INTRODUCTION: Isokinetic exercise can improve joint muscle strength and stability, making it suitable for early rehabilitation of stroke patients. However, traditional isokinetic equipment is bulky and costly, and cannot effectively avoid external environmental interference. METHODS: This paper designed a lightweight upper limb joint isokinetic rehabilitation training equipment, with a control system that includes a speed planning strategy and speed control with disturbance rejection. Based on the established human-machine kinematic closed-loop model between the equipment and the user, a dynamic evaluation method of torque at the joint level was proposed. RESULTS: To validate the effectiveness of the equipment, experiments were conducted by manually applying random disturbances to the equipment operated at an isokinetic speed. The results showed that the root mean square error between the observed torque curve of the second-order linear extended state observer used in this paper and the actual disturbance curve was 0.52, and the maximum speed tracking error of the speed control algorithm was 1.27%. In fast and slow sinusoidal speed curve tracking experiments, the root mean square errors of the speed tracking results for this algorithm were 9.65 and 5.27, respectively, while the tracking errors for the PID speed control algorithm under the same environment were 19.94 and 12.11. DISCUSSION: The research results indicate that compared with traditional PID control method, the proposed control strategy demonstrates superior performance in achieving isokinetic control and suppressing external disturbances, thereby exhibiting significant potential in promoting upper limb rehabilitation among patients.