Design and Control of a Bimanual Rehabilitation System for Trunk Impairment Patients

Stroke is one of the leading causes of severe long-term disability worldwide. Past research has proved the effectiveness and importance of trunk rehabilitation in enhancing the locomotive capacities and balance of patients with hemiplegia. The current robot-assisted rehabilitation mainly focuses on limbs but less on trunk training. In this paper, we have developed a bimanual rehabilitation system for trunk impairment patients. The main contribution of the work is twofold. First, the synchronized training trajectory generation method of the two articulated robots is proposed by introducing a simplified yet effective trunk kinematic model and taking the past demonstrations as experience. Second, an improved admittance controller is embedded to modulate the training trajectories online in catering to subjects’ different locomotion capacities. The physical experiments are conducted to validate the feasibility of our system. It is expected that, upon the availability of clinical trials, the effectiveness of our system in the locomotion restoring training of trunk impairment patients will be further confirmed.