Your hospital can compare this exoskeleton to all the other ones out there and the ones they have in house. Don't laugh, I'm just making a crazy assed assumption what a competent stroke hospital would be doing. You can compare that to what your stroke hospital is doing.
exoskeleton (170 posts to June 2011)
Upper and Lower limb interchangeable Exoskeleton-robot for post stroke rehabilitation
I. Introduction
The recent progress in a powered exoskeleton has been focused on many regions within the medical sectors, including the purpose of load augmentation for assisting trauma patients, paraplegic patients, hemiplegic patients, spinal cord injured patients and rehabilitation purposes [1]. Based on the purpose, the exoskeleton can be designed for the upper limb or the lower limb. The human body’s upper limb consists of an intricate skeletal structure, including shoulder complex, elbow complex, wrist joint, and fingers. The upper limb’s significant motions are allowed by the glenohumeral joints in the shoulder, elbow joint, radioulnar joint, wrist joint, and the movement of fingers [2]. The glenohumeral joint allows three degrees of freedom (abduction/adduction, flexion/extension and internal/external rotation) in the shoulder complex. In the elbow joint, the primary movement is flexion/extension, which provides one degree of freedom. Besides, the radioulnar joint enables the pronation/supination motion, and the wrist joint allows flexion/extension and abduction/adduction, hence overall providing three degrees of freedom. Rehabilitation for each joint in the fingers would require a complex setup as the fingers’ intricate movements are allowed through numerous joints. In this paper, we will be only focusing on the shoulder, elbow and wrist joints. For lower limbs, excluding the toes, the significant motions are enabled by the hip joint with three degrees of freedom (flexion/extension, abduction/adduction and internal/external rotation), knee joint with three degrees of freedom (flexion/extension and rotation) and ankle joint with three degrees of freedom (plantarflexion/dorsiflexion, abduction/adduction and eversion/inversion) [3]. Furthermore, due to the knee joint profile, the instantaneous helical axis of rotation of the biological joint deviates from a monocentric joint of the exoskeleton [4]. Based on the study [4] results, the knee joint experiences a maximum misalignment of 27.212 mm from the respective axis. As the obtained misalignment is significant enough to cause discomfort during the flexion of the knee, the design proposed in this paper has considered this issue. Another classification of the exoskeleton is based on the type of actuation. Previous research [5]–[7] indicates that there are two common modes of actuations: motor-driven actuation and pneumatic air muscle actuation. For each actuation, there are various modes of transmission to the system. Table I illustrates the different actuations and transmission generally used for the medical exoskeleton. In addition to these actuations, there were other actuations such as the three-layered spring slider spring mechanism [8] and Shape Memory Alloy actuation [9], but these actuations lacked controllability and feasibility. Based on the research in Table I and the availability of actuators in the market, the motor-driven actuation directly attached to the joints was a more feasible option. The primary issue of most of the previous exoskeletons is the cost-effectiveness of the solution, hence preventing it from reaching the market for the general public’s usage. Also, the previous works have only provided solutions individually for the upper limbs and the lower limbs. Hence, this paper’s primary goal is to provide a viable design and analysis of the exoskeleton suit, which utilizes the minimal number of actuators for the required exercises and provides a way to use the suit interchangeably for both upper and lower limbs.
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