Soft and Hard Robotics for Movement Rehabilitation, Analysis and Modelling

Dementia and stroke have been considered two major causes of disability in the UK. The field of rehabilitation robotics emerged since early 90’s as a tool to assist therapists with assessing stroke and dementia patients and providing the necessary therapy. The present article aims to offer a review of how current hard robotic devices utilized in upper and lower limb rehabilitation, and how successful they were in increasing the efficiency of the recovery process. Their bottlenecks and short comes are discussed and soft robotics are presented as alternative techniques to resolve them. Novel pneumatic Muscle Actuators (pMA) capable of bending in contrary to traditional pMA are studied here. In particular, we investigate and propose a novel exoskeleton soft robotic arm, which made of several novel pMA for elbow joint rehabilitation. For this purpose, analysis, design, integration and characterization of the proposed arm are presented and geometrical and numerical models are obtained. This study shows that how our proposed exoskeleton soft robotic arm with a lower cost can increase the efficiency of rehabilitation recovery process.