L2M-NSERC - Development of a Wearable Distributed Mechatronic System: Applications in Musculoskeletal Rehabilitation of the Upper Limb

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Millions of people worldwide suffer from musculoskeletal disorders or injuries. Wearable robotic devices are being developed to improve musculoskeletal rehabilitation by allowing the patient to perform exercises and activities of daily living at home. However, wearable robotic devices are still far from ideal, as they are bulky and heavy. Hence, there is a strong need to create new technologies to reduce the bulk weight problem. The approach being explored in this work is to distribute the weight of the hardware components on different joints and muscles, instead of locating all of them on one part of the body. This results in a new challenge: how to distribute the tasks among several modules (both software and hardware) that together, will support the motion of the upper limb? As a solution, tasks will be distributed over six types of modules that consist of sensors and units for collecting and processing the data from several muscles and joints of the upper limb, machine learning algorithms to define if anomaly in the movements exists, and decision units paired with actuators that will take the best actions required for the correct upper body movement. The focus of this work will be to develop the modules for assisting people with shoulder and arm injury. When a patient is prescribed rehabilitative exercises, they tend to use alternative motions (known as compensatory motions), such as forward leaning or torso rotation, to reach a target. Thus, the first objective is to design a module to automatically detect and classify compensatory motions. The second objective is to design a module to provide feedback to the patient if the compensatory motion is detected. To this end, a strategy to provide force (known as force feedback) for supporting the joints and muscles of the upper limb will be developed. The third objective focuses on bringing all of the modules together into a physical garment to evaluate the feasibility of the proposed distributed wearable mechatronic device. The outcome of the project will be a series of modules distributed throughout the upper limb, thereby reducing the bulk weight problem. Considering the improvement in the weight distribution over the upper limb, the proposed design has the potential to be used in a home setting.