Development of a haptic bilateral interface for arm self-rehabilitation

This paper presents a newly-developed haptic interface for arm self-rehabilitation based on bilateral control. The purpose of this research is the improvement of the physical function of patients' arm with hemiplegia. In order to acquire enough motion range for the rehabilitation, the X-Y tables with two degrees-of-freedom are utilized as the haptic system. The developed interface realizes the rehabilitation environment on the basis of the integration of the bilateral control system for haptic transmission between arms and the virtual reality for visual guidance. This integration can provide the self-rehabilitation suitable for the patients with hemiplegia. In this paper, the results of bilateral control in the presented haptic system and the results of basic evaluation for the physicality of the human arm in the reaching task are presented. From these experimental results, the utility of the developed interface is verified.