Interactive Rehabilitation Using a General-Purpose Industrial Robot

Rehabilitation is a medical process with high demand in current society. To reduce the work-load of the rehabilitation physicians, robot assisted rehabilitation has been investigated extensively in the literature, but usually a special purpose machine is to be designed and constructed. In this work, it is proposed to use the general-purpose industrial robot to achieve the functions of the rehabilitation robots. The key to the success of this idea lies in the capability of the industrial robot to receive real-time control interventions. Therefore, certain special function control modules need to be available on the industrial robots. A preliminary design of this concept using an ABB® robot is presented. Planner motions for the upper limb rehabilitations were tested with several human subjects, and the experimental results show that the designed system can provide the basic functions that are expected from the rehabilitation robots.