Towards a robotic exoskeleton for remote evaluation of elbow and wrist joints

Abstract

Telehealth assistive technologies constitute a very promising field to improve quality of life. Teleoperated from a distant location, a robot device can become a beneficial tool in health applications, to allow physical remote interaction between specialized personal and a patient. This paper aims at presenting a teleoperated, powered, robotic exoskeleton-based system for real-time evaluation of upper limb function. The telerobotic platform consists in hardware and software for “remote assessment”. The system provides measurements of joint angle and interaction force at the elbow and wrist level. A set of experiments was carried out to evaluate the technical aspects of the system, and preliminary results shows feasibility for remote evaluation.