Current status and future perspectives of active knee joint rehabilitation device

Background: Today, living standards and medical technology are improving, and the aging global population is increasing. Moreover, more and more older adults are suffering from knee diseases. This will seriously affect patients’ daily life and their mental state. In many studies, repetitive physical exercises and motor activities in real-world environments have been shown to help improve knee muscle strength and restore damaged nerves. Therefore, physical knee therapy is very necessary. The use of rehabilitation training devices for movement therapy has shown great potentia Objective: The structural features, functions and development status of the knee rehabilitation training device are introduced Method: This review explores the structure and function of various current knee rehabilitation devices based on structural and kinematic properties of the knee joint in relation to requirements of physical knee rehabilitation. This paper aims to present a systematic guideline and to outline a reference for future designers of rehabilitation devices. Results: By analyzing the structure and movement of the knee joint and combining the strategies of physical knee rehabilitation, movement requirements during knee rehabilitation training are concluded. According to the structure, drive form, transmission mode and rehabilitation environment of knee rehabilitation devices, the devices are classified and compared; some typical features are summarized; some current problems are analyzed; and the future trends and development directions of rehabilitation devices are discussed. Conclusion: Current rehabilitation equipment has a variety of structures and functions, but a good balance between weight and volume is hardly maintained. The protection of the body needs to be further improved. Many knee rehabilitation devices are only concepts, not physical objects, and lack clinical trial data. Power sources and drives are large and heavy, which can compress the knee joint and place a burden on the patient. Strong and light-weight materials should be chosen to assist knee rehabilitation. It will be a good development in the future

Research Advances on Passive Knee Joints Rehabilitation Device

Background: After a smooth development of life expectancy per capita and fertility in the nineteenth century, the global population exploded in size. Along with the demographic shift in the late nineteenth century, the phenomenon of population aging began to appear in developed countries. And a survey from UN reports that by 2050, one in six people worldwide will be over 65 years old (16%), compared to 11 (9%) in 2019. According to a survey, 55% of people over the age of 60 suffer from joint diseases, and the number of people suffering from stroke, arthritis and other knee diseases will also increase accordingly. Objective: An overview of the classification and characteristics of today's knee rehabilitation devices and future developments. Methods: This review discusses the existing knee rehabilitation devices, including various products on the market, patents and some conceptual devices, in the context of the structural characteristics of the knee joint and the rehabilitation requirements of various knee conditions or after knee arthroplasty, and systematically introduces their structural features, differences and the rehabilitation effects achieved. Results: A comparative analysis of three types of passive knee rehabilitation devices according to their use was conducted to summarize the typical characteristics. The problems that exist in today's rehabilitation devices are also analyzed, and their development trends are looked forward to. Conclusion: Knee rehabilitation equipment has a high degree of structural richness, but it does not achieve a good balance of convenience, comfort and functionality, and there should be some room for improvement in the materials, volume of the power source and transmission form of the power system. knee joint recovery. There will be a good development in the future.

A Compact Soft Robotic Wrist Brace With Origami Actuators

Wrist disability caused by a series of diseases or injuries hinders the patient’s capability to perform activities of daily living (ADL). Rehabilitation devices for the wrist motor function have gained popularity among clinics and researchers due to the convenience of self-rehabilitation. The inherent compliance of soft robots enabled safe human-robot interaction and light-weight characteristics, providing new possibilities to develop wearable devices. Compared with the conventional apparatus, soft robotic wearable rehabilitation devices showed advantages in flexibility, cost, and comfort. In this work, a compact and low-profile soft robotic wrist brace was proposed by directly integrating eight soft origami-patterned actuators on the commercially available wrist brace. The linear motion of the actuators was defined by their origami pattern. The extensions of the actuators were constrained by the brace fabrics, deriving the motions of the wrist joint, i.e., extension/flexion, ulnar/radial deviation. The soft actuators were made of ethylene-vinyl acetate by blow molding, achieving mass-production capability, low cost, and high repeatability. The design and fabrication of the soft robotic wrist brace are presented in this work. The experiments on the range of motion, output force, wearing position adaptivity, and performance under disturbance have been carried out with results analyzed. The modular soft actuator approach of design and fabrication of the soft robotic wrist brace has a wide application potential in wearable devices.

Overview of solutions used in rehabilitation devices using muscles and pneumatic actuators

The article presents selected rehabilitation devices with the use of classic actuators and pneumatic muscles. Manipulators supporting the movements of the lower and upper limbs of humans are presented. Moreover, the construction of actuators and pneumatic muscles is described.

A Case Study on the Design and Implementation of a Platform for Hand Rehabilitation

Rehabilitation aids help people with temporal or permanent disabilities during the rehabilitation process. However, these solutions are usually expensive and, consequently, inaccessible outside of professional medical institutions. Rapid advances in software development, Internet of Things (IoT), robotics, and additive manufacturing open up a way to affordable rehabilitation solutions, even to the general population. Imagine a rehabilitation aid constructed from accessible software and hardware with local production. Many obstacles exist to using such technology, starting with the development of unified software for custom-made devices. In this paper, we address open issues in designing rehabilitation aids by proposing an extensive rehabilitation platform. To demonstrate our concept, we developed a unique platform, RehabHand. The main idea is to use domain-specific language and code generation techniques to enable loosely coupled software and hardware solutions. The main advantage of such separation is support for modular and a higher abstraction level by enabling therapists to write rehabilitation exercises in natural, domain-specific terminology and share them with patients. The same platform provides a hardware-independent part that facilitates the integration of new rehabilitation devices. Experience in implementing RehabHand with three different rehabilitation devices confirms that such rehabilitation technology can be developed, and shows that implementing a hardware-independent rehabilitation platform might not be as challenging as expected.