MYO Armband-based a Master-Slave Heterolateral Elbow Joint Rehabilitation Robot System

Recent years, due to the outbreak of the COVID-19, non-contact rehabilitation medical methods gain traction. The master-slave rehabilitation robot system which meet the good isolation effect has become the equipment that rehabilitation hospitals crave. During treatment, long-term ipsilateral rehabilitation guidance will easily cause muscle fatigue in the physiothesrapist’s guiding arm, while part of heterolateral control (like foot-hand control) may reduces the rehabilitation effect. In order to balance that, in this paper, a novel master-slave heterolateral elbow joint robot rehabilitation system is proposed. Physiotherapist control the patient’s heterolateral elbow joint robotic arm through the MYO armband, enabling the physiotherapist to observe the patient’s movements more intuitively while maintaining a safe distance from the patient face to face. The sEMG signal of the physiotherapist’s upper arm are transmitted to the system through the surface electromyography (sEMG) sensor in the MYO armband, so that it can realize the motion reconstruction of the driven end, thereby helping patients with heterolateral motion rehabilitation. To confirm the effectiveness of the system, the master-end elbow joint motion angle estimated by the sEMG signal are compared with the actually grasped hetero-slave-end motion angle obtained from the IMU by us. At the moment, the control accuracy of the mechanical system and the recognition accuracy of the prediction period are analyzed by us. The experiment proves the feasibility of this master-slave heterolateral elbow rehabilitation robot system.