Design of a Robotic System for Diagnosis and Rehabilitation of Lower Limbs
This work addresses the problem of inconsistent and understudied robotic systems for lower limb diagnosis and rehabilitation, primarily for researchers and engineers in medical robotics, but it is incremental as it builds on existing design principles.
The authors tackled the lack of uniform design criteria and limited study of diagnosis in lower limb robotic rehabilitation by proposing a design guide based on human leg mobility and physiotherapy techniques, illustrated with a case study of a parallel robot that offers advantages like high load capacity and movement restriction capabilities.
Currently, lower limb robotic rehabilitation is widely developed, However, the devices used so far seem to not have a uniform criteria for their design, because, on the contrary, each developed mechanism is often presented as if it does not take into account the criteria used in previous designs. On the other hand, the diagnosis of lower limb from robotic devices has been little studied. This chapter presents a guide for the design of robotic devices in diagnosis of lower limbs, taking into account the mobility of the human leg and the techniques used by physiotherapists in the execution of exercises and the rehabilitation of rehabilitation and diagnosis tests, as well as the recommendations made by various authors, among other aspects. The proposed guide is illustrated through a case study based on a parallel robot RPU+3UPS able to make movements that are applied during the processes of rehabilitation and diagnosis. The proposal presents advantages over some existing devices such as its load capacity that can support, and also allows you to restrict the movement in directions required by the rehabilitation and the diagnosis movements.