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Affecting muscle spasticity, strength, and coordination, stroke results in alterations to muscle control and ability to compensate from unexpected perturbations. Post-stroke, upper extremity movements are heavily modified from perturbations, which increase the difficulty of activities of daily living (ADLs). Postural responses from upper extremity perturbations in healthy and stroke populations have been examined in movements constrained to 2D planar motion, and may provide insight as an assessment tool to help inform therapists to better structure rehabilitation training regimens towards individualized health care for improved long-term outcomes. However, implications on constraining motion in the horizontal plane are not clear and may reduce the generalizability of the findings to the movement through unconstrained 3D space necessary for ADLs. In this paper, we explore the effects of joint perturbations on the elbow and shoulder in unconstrained, gravity-compensated position holding tasks. We present a metric-diverse, dynamic task framework building upon previous 2D experiments designed to better assess rehabilitative efforts in movement trajectories with applied gravity compensation in three dimensional space aimed towards the generalizability of 3D motion. Results suggest that motion of multi-DoF joints display varied movement qualities in 3D space with robotic gravity compensation when compared to constrained planar movements.
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A six degrees-of-freedom cable-driven robotic platform for head–neck movement
Abstract This paper introduces a novel cable-driven robotic platform that enables six degrees-of-freedom (DoF) natural head–neck movements. Poor postural control of the head–neck can be a debilitating symptom of neurological disorders such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and cerebral palsy. Current treatments using static neck collars are inadequate, and there is a need to develop new devices to empower movements and facilitate physical rehabilitation of the head–neck. State-of-the-art neck exoskeletons using lower DoF mechanisms with rigid linkages are limited by their hard motion constraints imposed on head–neck movements. By contrast, the cable-driven robot presented in this paper does not constrain motion and enables wide-range, 6-DoF control of the head–neck. We present the mechatronic design, validation, and control implementations of this robot, as well as a human experiment to demonstrate a potential use case of this versatile robot for rehabilitation. Participants were engaged in a target reaching task while the robot applied both assistive and resistive moments on the head during the task. Our results show that neck muscle activation increased by 19% when moving the head against resistance and decreased by 28–43% when assisted by the robot. Overall, these results provide a scientific justification for further research in enabling movement and identifying personalized rehabilitation for motor training. Beyond rehabilitation, other applications such as applying force perturbations on the head to study sensory integration and applying traction to achieve pain relief may benefit from the innovation of this robotic platform which is capable of applying controlled 6-DoF forces/moments on the head.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2240508
- PAR ID:
- 10500840
- Publisher / Repository:
- Nature Publishing Group
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Scientific Reports
- Volume:
- 14
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2045-2322
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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