2008 Volume 13 Issue 1 Pages 79-87
Rehabilitation robots are effective to evaluate quantitatively rehabilitative therapies. Some kinds of haptic devices have been developed by many researchers and evaluated its efficiency with clinical tests for example upper limb training for patients with spasticity after stroke. Almost all the devices for upper limb rehabilitation have only 2-DOF for its active motion. But the upper limb of human works in 3-D space even except for the wrist; therefore designing a rehabilitation system for 3-D training is important. We developed new haptic devices which have 2-DOF force-feedback function on a worktable but the inclination of the worktable can be adjusted. We named this system "Quasi-3-DOF Rehabilitation System for Upper Limbs" or "PLEMO". Additionally, PLEMO is a passive haptic device using ER brakes with high safety. In this paper, we describe the mechanism of PLEMO and its software for the upper limb rehabilitation.
