An Intelligent Rehabilitation Robotic Systems for Upper Limb Injury

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Stroke remains a leading cause of motor function loss. According to the Heart and Stroke Foundation, stroke costs the Canadian economy $2.7 billion a year. Since health care resources are limited, technology has the potential to play a bigger role in rehabilitation. Our team, in consultation with experienced therapists, has developed an intelligent user-friendly arm rehabilitation robotics system. Health Canada approved the system as a new class II medical device for investigational trials. A randomized controlled clinical trial with 20 stroke patients was conducted at Hamilton Health Sciences. Our trial proved that robot-assisted treament only, without additional physical therapy interventions can improve both motor function and arm functionality. Literature advocates that a potential approach to increase the effectiveness beyond past studies, is to develop a new whole upper limb (arm and hand) functionality-based rehabilitation robot, which maximizes recovery of motor schema. The majority of hand devices reported were designed as stand-alone devices and could not be integrated into our rehabilitation system to form an upper limb, hand and arm robotic device. Also, current hand devices are often too large and heavy to be used as an end-effector, have too limited a range of force, or have many actuators to drive all the finger digits with a control system that cannot be integrated with a standard robot controller. Hence, we will design a hand device to be integrated with the current arm rehabilitation robot (objective i) to achieve activities of daily living. Current literature suggests that robot-assisted therapy should focus on the kinematical and kinetic analysis to differentiate between genuine upper limb motor and functional recovery. Moreover, no previous studies addressed the quantitative evaluation of both the patient's arm and hand recovery during treatment. The research objectives ii & iii will develop an Intelligent Monitoring and Evaluation system and a stroke recovery assessment system based on collected kinematic and kinetic data to evaluate the patient's level of motor function impairment and progress of the arm and hand. Hence, the research is essential, innovative, addresses the state of the art and makes Canada a leader in rehabilitation robotics.