A novel upper-limb rehabilitation robot with 4 DOFs: Design and prototype

Abstract

In recent years, robotic rehabilitation has been utilized in treatment and recovery of patients with disabilities. In this paper, a novel design and kinematic analysis of a 4-DOF robot for upper-limb rehabilitation are proposed. The main novelty of this design is its mechanism for wrist and fingers motions which is added to the shoulder and elbow mechanism without any noticeable weight increase in the moving parts of the robot. For this purpose, a cable driven mechanism is implemented at the robot end-effector to move the wrist and fingers parts, and the corresponding actuators are placed at the base of the robot.