Development of an ankle motion detecting mechanism for ankle rehabilitation training

Up to now, the number of hemiplegia rehabilitation devices is increasing quickly. But most of ankle rehabilitation training just limit to the training of patients' affected side. They ignore the importance of patients' subjective participation in the recovery of central nervous system. In our new research, we proposed a new method that making use of the movements of the sound side to realize the passive training of the affected side. Therefore, an ankle motion detecting mechanism is proposed to detect the ankle motion of patients' sound side. In this paper, we will introduce the detail design of the mechanism. It includes three detecting units for recording the rotations of ankle. Comparing with other Body-movement information detection method, such as optical measurement method and biological signals measuring method, it can gather the real-time information of three rotations of ankle with a simple structure. This ankle motion detecting mechanism can not only detects the ankle motion but also helps patients do affected ankle strength training. Finally, the workspace analysis of this detecting mechanism is carried out to verify the ability of the designed mechanism.