Design of Portable Physiotherapy Instrument With Stable Stimulation Current for Assisting in Tuina

Abstract

Chinese Tuina, a manual massage therapy in traditional Chinese medicine, can be further enhanced with appropriate electrical stimulation to achieve improved physical therapy effects. However, as the several key parameters (i.e., duration, contact area and force) in Tuina manipulation treatment change, the stimulation current may become unstable and result in discomfort to the patient. We developed a portable physiotherapy instrument to assist in Tuina physiotherapy. In our design, multi-electrodes are introduced to expand depth and range of stimulation. Meanwhile, a current control method is proposed to stabilize the stimulation current during the variation of the Tuina physiotherapist’s manipulation. The Euclidean Distance about average peak-to-peak value of the ideal output and our method output voltage in a single cycle is only 1.5899, this value represents the voltage data in volts (V) after being amplified by a factor of 10 by the oscilloscope. Compared with other control algorithms, the proposed method reduces the Euclidean distance by at least 38.960%. Furthermore, the proposed method can effectively decrease the current change caused by the changes of the physiotherapist’s manipulation, thus reducing the patient’s discomfort during treatment.