Impedance control of CPM device with flex-/extension and pro-/supination for upper limbs

Continuous Passive Motion (CPM) is a surgical treatment or physiotherapy after surgery or trauma. Most of the CPM devices used for treatment of the elbow joint have one degree of freedom in flex-/extension. For this reason, the patients are limited in pro-/supination of the forearm with flex-/extension of the elbow joint according to the arm movement of the CPM device. In this paper, a novel impedance control scheme of pro-/supination is proposed for CPM device with flex-/extension and pro-/supination. Impedance control is designed for the reference trajectory measured from a normal subject, and the parameters for impedance control are designed in order to suppress the excessive force at the limitation of range of motion. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is evaluated by experiments.