Development of a robot system for rehabilitation of upper limbs cooperative movement functions

Upper limbs cooperative movement functions are very important in our everyday life. Due to many kinds of brain diseases, people usually reduced or even lost their half side of body activities, which made it difficult to realize cooperative movements between right and left limbs. In this research, we developed a novel robot system, integrated with virtual reality technologies to perform rehabilitation of upper limbs cooperative movement functions, such as to realize simultaneous upper limbs motions or to cooperatively catch and setting a common object in 3D space. Three types of rehabilitation movements are designed so that the subject can train their each arm along as well as cooperative movements with game style. The motion trajectories as well as the contact forces with objects of the subjects are automatically recorded so as to evaluate the performance of rehabilitation.