Mechatronic design of an ankle-foot rehabilitation robot for children with cerebral palsy and preliminary clinical trial

Abstract

Cerebral palsy (CP) is the most prevalent physical disability originating in childhood and with impaired motor function secondary to injury of the immature brain. In this paper, we developed a robotic ankle-foot rehabilitation system for children with cerebral palsy (RARS-CP). We introduce the novelties in robot mechanical design, actuation and transmission, and hierarchical control system. Customized graphical user interfaces are developed in Labview environment based on FPGA-based embedded system. To validate the reliability and feasibility of the proposed system, we recruit a health subject and a child with CP to carry out experiments, respectively. In the experiment, we firstly verified characterization of low-level robot control, including three working modalities: position control, torque control and velocity-torque control. Then, we performed a passive stretching therapy and game-based active rehabilitation sessions for the patient to further test the whole system. Preliminary results about robot performance demonstrate that the proposed RARS-CP is a promising solution in CP clinical rehabilitation for ankle joint.