IEEE Int Conf Rehabil Robot. 2022 Jul;2022:1-6. doi: 10.1109/ICORR55369.2022.9896493.
Patients suffering from neuromuscular diseases experience motor disabilities which hinder their independence during activities of daily living (ADLs). For such impaired subjects, robotic devices and Functional Electrical Stimulation (FES) are technologies commonly used to rehabilitate lost functions. Nevertheless, both systems present some limitations, and merging FES and robots in Hybrid Robotic Rehabilitation Systems allows to overcome these boundaries. Here we propose for the first time a hybrid cooperative controller involving FES and a soft wearable upper arm exosuit to rehabilitate elbow movements. We tested the designed hybrid controller on six healthy participants. The results showed how the proposed hybrid controller allowed the wearers to perform flexion movements with no significant decrease in accuracy and precision with respect to the exosuit alone, while significantly decreasing the fatigue level by about 63% and delaying its onset with respect to the FES action alone.
患有神经肌肉疾病的患者会出现运动障碍，这会妨碍他们在日常生活活动（ADL）中的独立性。对于这类受损的受试者，机器人设备和功能性电刺激（FES）是常用于恢复丧失功能的技术。然而，这两种系统都存在一些局限性，将 FES 和机器人合并到混合机器人康复系统中可以克服这些局限性。在这里，我们首次提出了一种涉及 FES 和软可穿戴式上臂外骨骼的混合协作控制器，以恢复肘部运动。我们在六名健康参与者身上测试了设计的混合控制器。结果表明，与单独使用外骨骼相比，所提出的混合控制器如何允许佩戴者进行弯曲运动，而不会显著降低准确性和精度，同时与单独使用 FES 相比，疲劳程度显著降低了约 63%，并且其发作时间延迟。
