Preliminary Design of a Novel Teleoperation Interface for Home-based Upper Limb Rehabilitation

With the increasing incidence of stroke, the demand for post-stroke rehabilitation is also increased. Various rehabilitation devices have been proposed to facilitate home-based rehabilitation and reduce the therapist’s workload. This paper presnets a novel teleoperation interface to allow the therapist in the hospital to guide the patient’s rehabilitation at home via TCP/IP communication. In order to achieve safe and comfortable home-based rehabilitation, the proposed teleoperation interface implements independent position and stiffness control to remotely guide the operation of the exoskeleton device worn on the patient. The preliminary experimental results showed that the proposed tele-rehabilitation was capable of providing effective power assistance and stiffness adjustment in real time under the guidance of the therapist.