Development of Rehabilitation Apparatus for Frozen Shoulder Adapting Each Motion based on Direct Teaching

There is frozen shoulder that a patient feels pain around the shoulder if the shoulder is moved in everyday life. It is necessary for the patient with the frozen shoulder to receive the rehabilitation for improvement of the QOL in the hospital, and it is important that the load of the physical therapist is reduced. To solve them, various machines and robots of the rehabilitation for the frozen shoulder are studied and developed. It is not suitable to repeat predefined motions to trace the general rehabilitation motion, since the motion of the shoulder in the rehabilitation should be adapted to the condition of each patient. Therefore, we are developing the rehabilitation robot for the frozen shoulder based on the direct teaching and playback motion. This paper describes the development of apparatus adapting each motion in the rehabilitation in the hospital normally. First, the motions in the rehabilitation are analyzed, the mechanism of the apparatus is considered based on the analysis. After that, the apparatus with five actuators is developed practically, and the direct teaching and playback motion are investigated by the participant that wears the apparatus. As a result, the realization of the apparatus is verified.