Design and development of rehabilitation device for hemiparetic patients

Abstract

In this thesis, the development of rehabilitation device for patients who encounter walking weakness due to post-stroke effect is presented. . In order to design an efficient new mechanism, studies were carried out regarding kinematic of human walking. In the study, the motion of a healthy physical subject in walking situation of 1 km/h speed is used as guide to design the device. Thereafter, a mechanism was developed to produce similar motion. The device functions to actuate knee and hip rotation. The device is driven by a single actuator to drive both the hip and the knee joints mechanism. The kinematic analysis of constructed device has been performed and the results conformed the functionality of the suggested mechanism. The fabricated prototype shows the combination of DC motor and cam mechanism can actuated the movement of hip and knee joint simultaneously and may significantly reduced the power consumption. The computer based controller has also been developed with simple and practical application. With the combination of the controller and the fabricated model, the output profile of the rehabilitation device is acceptable by comparing with profile of actual data.