Elbow exercise assistant

Rehabilitation robotics is a widely researched area in the field of robotics at the present time. This is the use of a robot to physically assist the user’s limbs in movement during rehabilitation exercises. There is a wide range of diseases and other conditions including injuries and stroke, which causes full or partial loss of motor functions in the limbs. The usual method of treatment for these ailments are manual rehabilitation exercises or physiotherapy procedures, which involve highly skilled personnel trained in the field and are usually labor intensive. By using an exoskeleton robot, these exercises can be controlled and monitored with minimal supervision. The goal of this project is to build a prototype wearable exoskeleton device to assist the elbow motions, supporting a patient as the patient extends or flex the arm to aid rehabilitation. The device presented is able to record the exercise motions and the data is stored in a web server. This data can be used by a physiotherapist to monitor and control the patients exercises. The device can be configured manually or remotely. The design of the device, testing data and suggested future improvements are presented in this paper.