Development of CR2-Haptic: A compact and portable rehabilitation robot for wrist and forearm training

Abstract

Stroke has now become the leading cause of severe disability. Rehabilitation robots are gradually becoming popular for stroke rehabilitation to improve motor recovery, as robotic technology can assist, enhance, and further quantify rehabilitation training for stroke patients. However, most of the available rehabilitation robots are complex and involve multiple degrees-of-freedom (DOFs) causing it to be very expensive and huge in size. Rehabilitation robots should be useful but also need to be affordable and portable enabling more patients to afford and train independently at home. This paper presents a development of an affordable, portable and compact rehabilitation robot that implements different rehabilitation strategies for stroke patient to train forearm and wrist movement in an enhanced virtual reality environment with haptic feedback.