Designing the Robot Arms for Upper Limb Recovery Movements of Post-Stroke Patients

Strokes are one of the top dangerous diseases leading to death. Post-stroke patients are a huge burden for both their relatives and social activities. And bimanual coordination activities and resistance forces play important roles in the recovery processes for post-stroke patients. Therefore, this paper proposes simple robotic arms assisting post-stroke patients in terms of their upper limb movement recovery. The robotic arms use the combination of in-phase or 90-degree patterns as bimanual exercises and linear springs as resistance agents for the patient's arms. Patients place their arms on each robot arm and conduct bimanual tasks while resistance forces are generated automatically by adjusting the device's spring lengths. The findings illustrated that both robotic arms are capable of following bimanual task motions and modifying the force by changing expected values on the computer. The amount of error force between the patient's arm and the device fluctuated around 2 newtons and the relative position of the two arms was roughly 10 degrees. This research results promise actual exercises to help post-stroke patients to recover their upper limb movements.