Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
IEEE ACCESS, cilt.11, ss.103601-103615, 2023 (SCI-Expanded)
Robotic rehabilitation is a solution for recovery from neuromuscular
diseases and supports physical therapists in performing high-intensity
and repetitive training activities. The main reason for the limitations
of rehabilitation robot utilization is economic factors because
rehabilitation robot technology requires high levels of investment and
relatively costly routine operation and maintenance. To facilitate
widespread adoption of rehabilitation robots, low-cost, highly
compliant, and simple-to-operate robotic rehabilitation devices are
required. In this study, to introduce a novel alternative solution to
the aforementioned problem, a low-cost, highly transparent, single
pneumatic artificial muscle (PAM) actuated robotic therapy orthosis that
enables the patient to perform all training modalities is introduced. A
novel control approach was developed by combining admittance control
and inverse-dynamics-based compliant controls. By means of simple
counterweight loads and compliant control, quasi-static movement of the
orthosis for active exercises is achieved for the full operation range
of PAM without any jerky transitions. A new assist-active modality named
“Patient Activated Assistance” (PAAM) was introduced, in which the
patient was the master, and the exercise was performed as long as the
patient was active, avoiding slacking. Assistance was provided by
sharing the load force in accordance with the applied gain. The orthosis
performance in realizing the training modalities was verified using
surface electromyogram (sEMG) measurements. The results demonstrated
that the proposed low-cost single-PAM-actuated robotic orthosis could be
a solution to robotic rehabilitation demands, especially in
low-middle-income countries (LMIC).