Technology assisted therapy has the potential to transform rehabilitation options available, and to dramatically increase the reach of today’s healthcare system. Yet challenges persist in rendering translational application designs that optimize the full potential of technology and create value for the patient and the therapist. In a step towards optimizing value of technologies for practical applications to support very weak patients who might otherwise be unable to participate in traditional therapies, an integrated sensory motor training station was designed and developed. Inspired by recent neuroscientific research findings the goal of the design was to provide concurrent first person perspective immersive action observation of both virtual and real elements for motor and sensory experience; the system incorporates a virtual limb proxy that can be personalized and actuated by the robot and that is accompanied by exercise practice in peripersonal space for a plasticity promoting experience for the hand and arm. The station uses virtual reality and real objects for visual sensory experience, real objects also provide tactile sensory experience, and an exoskeleton upper limb robot provides assistance to patients. For many patients, successful movement and movement intensity required in rehabilitation is not achievable without the robot assistance. The multi-sensory features of the system promote a top-down strategy for training the upper limb (hand and arm) complementing the robot training; the system is ideally targeted for weak patients and those with tactile or proprioception sensory loss and those who are known to benefit from multi-sensory experiences.

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Many kinds of power-assist robots have been developed in order to assist daily life motions of the elderly or physically weak persons. A human upper-limb has 7 degrees of freedom to achieve various tasks dexterously. Therefore, to assist all upper-limb joint motions of a human, the upper-limb power-assist robot is required to have 7DOF. On the other hand, to achieve a desired task, a person moves own hand to the desired position and orientation. For this reason, the hand position or hand force must be focused to be controlled by the upper-limb power-assist robots. However, the hand position or hand force is 6-dimensional vector, so the 7DOF upper-limb power-assist robot has a redundancy and in general, a pseudo-inverse matrix is used in the control. In this paper, the torque optimization for an upper-limb power-assist exoskeleton robot using the pseudo-inverse matrix is discussed. The effectiveness of the proposed method was evaluated by the experiments.

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The goal of this project is to develop an upper limb exoskeletal orthosis destinated to help disabled population to achieve arm movements. This orthosis is principally designed for people suffering from myopathy and muscle degeneration. Such patients cannot generate enough force to move alone their arm. This poster presents a new approach to control the exoskeleton using pressure sensors.

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Force feedback from the virtual world can greatly enhance the sense of immersion even for simple applications. The ISU force reflecting exoskeleton enables the user to interact dynamically with simulated environments by providing an electromagnetic haptic interface between the human and the environment. The paper describes the high bandwidth electromagnetic haptic interface and how it has been used to provide the sense of contact in the synthetic environment. The air gap between the magnetics, carried by the robot, and the coils attached to the human’s digits, allows for small relative motion between the human and the robot without affecting the transmission of forces. This flexibility allows the robot to track the human as well as develop appropriate forces from the virtual world. Three different typical synthetic environments are programmed and tested using the ISU force reflecting exoskeleton haptic interface device. The experimental results shows that the magnetic interface gives adequate force levels for perception of virtual objects, enhancing the feeling of immersion in the virtual environment

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An exoskeleton haptic interface is developed for functional training in virtual environments. A composite control scheme enables a variety of tasks to be implemented, and a ¿Qt¿ graphics library is used to generate the virtual environment for the haptic interface at the hand and graphical user interfaces for input and telemetry. Inter-process communications convert telemetry from the exoskeleton into motion commands for objects in the virtual environment. A second haptic interface at the upper arm is used to control the elbow orbit self-motion of the arm during tasks. Preliminary results are reviewed for a wall-painting task in which the virtual wall stiffness and viscosity are generated using an admittance controller.

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