Title
Changing human upper-limb synergies with an exoskeleton using viscous fields
Abstract
Robotic exoskeletons can apply forces distributed on the limbs of the subject they are connected to. This offers a great potential in the field of neurorehabilitation, to address the impairment of interjoint coordination in hemiparetic stroke patients. In these patients, the normal flexible joint rotation synergies are replaced by pathological fixed patterns of rotation. In this paper, we investigate how the concept of synergy can be exploited in the control of an upper limb exoskeleton. The long term goal is to develop a device capable of changing the joint synchronization of a patient performing exercises during rehabilitation. The paper presents a controller able of generating joint viscous torques in such a way that constraints on joint velocities can be imposed to the subject without constraining the hand motion. On another hand, the same formalism is used to describe synergies observed on the arm joint motion of subjects realizing pointing tasks. This approach is experimented on a 4 Degrees Of Freedom (DoF) upper arm exoskeleton with subjects performing pointing 3-dimensional tasks. Results exhibit the basic properties of the controller and show its capacity to impose an arbitrary chosen synergy without affecting the hand motion.
Year
DOI
Venue
2011
10.1109/ICRA.2011.5979626
Robotics and Automation
Keywords
Field
DocType
bone,diseases,medical robotics,mobile robots,motion control,neurophysiology,patient rehabilitation,torque,arm joint motion,flexible joint rotation synergies,hemiparetic stroke patient,human upper limb synergies,interjoint coordination impairment,joint synchronization,joint velocity,joint viscous torques,neurorehabilitation,pathological fixed rotation patterns,upper limb exoskeleton,viscous fields
Synchronization,Motion control,Upper limb,Medical robotics,Robot kinematics,Control engineering,Exoskeleton,Neurorehabilitation,Engineering,Mobile robot
Conference
Volume
Issue
ISSN
2011
1
1050-4729
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-61284-386-5
0
0.34
References 
Authors
5
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Crocher, V.100.34
Nathanaël Jarrassé2839.09
Sahbani, A.300.34
Agnès Roby-Brami4183.97