Design of a Magnetorheological Damper-Based Haptic Interface for Rehabilitation Applications

This article presents a novel haptic interface for rehabilitation purposes using MR-dampers. In the rehabilitation, patients are required to do certain exercises to train damaged muscles. Specialized devices are required to ensure patients will do the exercise accurately. Typical devices that are used for this application are difficult to program and may cause damage by applying excessive force to human body. The haptic device that is designed in this article will address the issues by employing MR-dampers and a user-friendly programming methodology. The concept of Resistive-Map generation is introduced as main strategy for activating MR-dampers and restricting the motion to the regions determined by the therapist. To simulate the performance of the system, an accurate model of MR-damper is obtained and validated experimentally. To test the performance of the proposed MR-based haptic device, the resistance-maps are first generated. MR-dampers are activated according to the positions of the MR-dampers in the resistance-map. The system is also simulated in MATLAB (R)/SimMechanics. The experimental and simulation results are in good agreement. The promising results of the proposed haptic interface make it a potential candidate for rehabilitation applications. Patients will be able to take the device home and the physiotherapists can online programme the exercises and monitor the performance of patients.