機能的電気刺激を用いた中手指節関節の角度制御

抄録

Functional electrical stimulation (FES) is a method of moving joints by applying electrical stimulation to muscles. Recently, FES has been attracting attention not only as a rehabilitation method but also as an application for healthy people. People use their fingers to perform various tasks, thus enabling them to control their fingers using FES is a critical issue. However, because the muscles that move the fingers are located complexly in the forearm, joint angle control has not been conventionally performed with five fingers. In this paper, we focused on the fingers, which are especially necessary for detailed work, and controlled their joint angles. The stimulation positions in the forearm were identified using multi-point electrodes. The control was performed by modeling the relationship between voltage and joint angle. Although the proposed method drove not all the subjects’ five fingers, the fingers whose stimulus positions could be identified could follow the target value.