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Robotic Care: A Low Cost Design to Assist Therapy for Brain Stroke Rehabilitation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 July 2019
Abstract
A low cost robotic-assisted prototype for finger and hand rehabilitation of people affected by a stroke is presented. The system was developed by a team of undergraduate students led by a Design lecturer in collaboration with the Rehabilitation Unit of the Peñablanca Public Hospital in Chile.
The system consists of a flexion sensor equipped glove, a hand exoskeleton and an Arduino control unit. The patient wears the glove in his healthy hand. When s/he performs movements with the healthy hand, the sensors register the flexion of the fingers and send this information to the servo motors installed in an exoskeleton attached to the affected hand. In this way, the affected hand reproduces the movement of the healthy hand. The system uses a combination of the mirror therapy (the patient sees his/her affected hand moving in the same way that the healthy hand does) and passive exercising (as the exoskeleton produces the movement of the hand affected by the stroke). The combination of two types of therapy in a single low cost system makes the present work unique. In the near future, the developed prototype will be used to validate the effectiveness of the new proposed robotic therapy.
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- Article
- Information
- Proceedings of the Design Society: International Conference on Engineering Design , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , July 2019 , pp. 975 - 984
- Creative Commons
- This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
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- © The Author(s) 2019
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