Irshaidat, MAE, Soufian, M, Al-Ibadi, A 
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0779-8217 and Nefti-Meziani, S
2019,
A novel elbow pneumatic muscle actuator for exoskeleton arm in post-stroke rehabilitation
, in: 2019 IEEE International Conference on Soft Robotics (RoboSoft 2019), 14-18 April 2019, Seoul, Korea.
Abstract
Rehabilitation interventions play a vital role
especially in most post-stroke care. Many rehabilitation robotic
devices have been designed and developed to assist many
individuals suffering from stroke or similar disabling illness
and living with reduced mobility of the arms, hands and other
joint. However, these devices remain unmanageable to use by
the patients alone not only because they are cumbersome to use
but also due to their weights, fix and non-portable
characteristics, and so on. Here for elbow joint rehabilitation,
we investigate and propose a novel exoskeleton soft robotic
arm, which is wearable, lightweight and portable so that it
would allow patients to perform repetitive motion therapy
more often with a greater intensity in their homes and relevant
to their daily activities. The proposed arm consists of various
novel pneumatic Muscle Actuators (pMA) capable of bending
in contrary to traditional pMA. Analysis, design, integration
and characterisation of the proposed arm are presented and
geometrical and numerical models are obtained. Various
experiments revealed its behaviour and the relationship among
pressure, length, force, and bending angle in different setups
such as isotonic and isometric. The nonlinear, time varying and
intractable dynamic of the constructed prototype demanded the
design and development of an appropriate closed loop
controller for adhering to target rehabilitation profiles. As
proof of the concept a Model Reference Adaptive Control
(MRAC) was designed and results were presented. By
achieving design objectives, this study shows that the proposed
portable exoskeleton has the ability to offer more effective
intense rehabilitation therapies at home without the need to
therapists and with a lower cost.
Keywords: upper extremity; limbs; rehabilitation; therapy;,
soft robots; movement; motion; robot; elbow rehabilitation
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