Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
JOURNAL OF INTELLIGENT & ROBOTIC SYSTEMS, cilt.106, sa.3, 2022 (SCI-Expanded)
The success of the physical therapy and rehabilitation depends on mostly the continuity of the exercises. The best way to ensure this continuity is to perform the exercises at home instead of therapy centers. At present, many of the rehabilitation devices including robots are not available to use at homes due to their high costs. Considering this fact, a low-cost and portable wrist rehabilitation robot (POWROBOT) that can be used both at home and physical therapy centers is manufactured in this study. Thus, more patients will be able to access rehabilitation robots and continue their treatment in the comfort of their home. It is expected that there will be an acceleration in the recovery of physically disabled patients with the increase in the use of the proposed rehabilitation robot at home. Force measurements are obtained from force sensors which constitutes a significant part of the robot price in general. Therefore, a low cost three-degree-of-freedom practical force sensor unit is also manufactured for human-robot interaction during rehabilitation. Pronation/supination, radial/ulnar deviation and flexion/ extension movement experiments are performed in order to illustrate performance of the proposed portable wrist rehabilitation robot. Passive, active-assistive and active exercise methods are used for all of these movements. Experiments are guided with a human-machine interface software and managed by a microcontroller with an embedded program. Finally, the results of the experiments are evaluated separately for each exercise type and, presented in figures and tables. These results reveal clearly the feasibility of the proposed robot according to manufacturing based design approaches.