Improvement of mechanism of upper extremity exercise support system “Robotherapist" and development of application software

Recently the needs for medical rehabilitation support systems are increasing in Japan, which use robot technology and virtual reality technology. Applying these technologies make efficient medical rehabilitation outcome. We have developed 6-degrees-of-freedom (DOF) upper extremity exercise system to evaluate synergy pattern an to exercise of upper extremity of stroke patients, named “Robotherapist”. When stroke patients who can move plural joints only under a certain pattern called synergy on reaching movement, some of them cannot keep their posture of the arm normal, but can move their hand along the aim orbit. In this study, we redesigned mechanism controlling the posture of the handle and the counter weight in order to improve the operability of “Robotherapist”. Additionally, we experimented on a measurement of reaching movement with our system and made a model of movement peculiar to stroke patients and a model of movement of healthy people. Finally, we propose application software for reaching training with this model. In this paper, we report new mechanism controlling the posture of the handle and the counter weight we redesigned and measurement of reaching movement and propose application software for reaching training with our system.