Upper Limb rehabilitation equipment with animation performance for isotonic and isokinetic exercises

Abstract

Therapeutic exercises play an important role in physical therapy and rehabilitation as it allows the patient who has difficulties of moving some parts of their body to recover. There are quite a number of commercialized robotics limb. However, the disadvantages found in those robotics limbs in terms of weight which causes they are placed at a fixed place, uninteresting routine as it is continual and lack of data evaluation on patients’ progress. Patients will usually work one-on-one with a physiotherapist to perform the exercises. Unfortunately, the limited number of physiotherapists would not be able to support numerous patients in a day. Due to that, the objective of the product is to propose a portable, functional and user’s friendly prototype. Next, the product is developed to analyze the muscle activities during active rehabilitation process using the EMG sensor and animation. Then, three conditions or protocols of exercises such as isometric, isotonic and isokinetic were conducted on a healthy person to collect EMG data. The EMG sensor is used to measure the muscle activity during exercising while Alice 3.3 software is used for gaming animation to visualize the rehabilitation procedure completed by the patients. The product is enhanced with a gyro-accelerometer sensor to detect motion with an orientation of x-axis for animation purpose. Users (i.e. patients) would need to grip the handle and stretch out the upper limb to perform a complete limb rehabilitation procedure while the stepper motor is functioning via battery power supply. For stroke patients, forward and reverse or extension and refraction procedures are provided to assist them in strengthening their affected limb. The highest contraction occur almost reaching 1000mV for isokinetic exercise but only around 600mV for isometric exercise. This accumulated almost 37.5% difference from both readings. The results showed that this equipment successfully performed the therapeutic exercises as the waveform of muscle contractions and relaxations manage to be collected and evaluate. As a conclusion, the outcomes achieved may facilitate us to contribute towards the development of new upper limb rehabilitation equipment with animation which brings advantages to patients for a speedy recovery.