A robot system and virtual environment for therapeutic exercise in upper limb rehabilitation: Virtual environment modeling

It is well known that exercise is indispensable in the course of rehabilitation for damaged bones, joints, and muscles. The damaged parts are treated with surgery and/or medicine then exercise is prescribed to recover normal function. Though various exercise machines, which control the force and speed of the exercise, are used for reliable exercise, they have common disadvantages in that the exercise is limited to only one joint, and reconfiguration is required according to the body part. Although exercise is prescribed for an injured joint, neighboring joints must also be exercised to prevent deterioration. However, because current exercise machines provide only single-joint exercise, adjacent joints must be exercised separately. These disadvantages can be overcome by introducing multi-joint exercise. A robot is introduced for multi-joint exercise and to solve the problems of existing exercise machines. The exercise system is a kind of haptic system, composed of a robot and virtual environment. This paper presents a virtual environment for multi-joint exercise in rehabilitation. The exercise is modeled as a virtual environment in which the robot and a human interact. It is expected that the virtual environment is flexible and can be modified easily to reflect various conditions of the exercise.