Evaluation and Verification of A Novel Wrist Rehabilitation Robot employing Safety-related Mechanism.

In this paper, we propose a wrist rehabilitation robot employing a novel actuation mechanism composed of electromagnetic clutch, brake, and motor and a safe-related mechanism. The actuation mechanism of the robot can perform both passive and active rehabilitation by the same mechanism. A torque sensor is also coupled to the actuation mechanism so as to measure the wrist joint moment in real-time. User can align his/her wrist joint to the center of rotation with the indication device. Moreover EMG is measured in real-time to evaluate effectiveness of active rehabilitation and to detect an emergency situation such as muscle spasm while doing active rehabilitation. In experiments, the effectiveness of active rehabilitation is evaluated and verified by 3D motion capture data and EMG data measured in real-time. The feasibility of the indication device is evaluated in the wrist joint alignment by verifying X-ray image of wrist and robot. Finally, we performed a usability test with five experts working in medical field, and the test result showed that the proposed robot can be applied to wrist rehabilitation.