Design, motion planning and control of frozen shoulder rehabilitation robot

This paper focused on the development of an exoskeleton-typed robot which is able to assist rehabilitation of frozen shoulder patients systematically and efficiently. The newly developed robot includes structural and functional features. First, the robot was designed to help patients rehabilitate both shoulders and three axes of the shoulder meet at one point to generate the human-like ball joint motions. Second, this robot has two different rehabilitation modes, which are joint rehabilitation mode and muscle rehabilitation mode. Joint rehabilitation mode helps patients recover their shoulders’ original range of motion by moving the patients’ shoulder according to the recorded patterns using motion capture system. Muscle rehabilitation mode strengthens patients’ shoulder muscles by applying suitable reactive forces against patients’ motion. Either or both of these two modes can be used for systematic frozen shoulder rehabilitation depending on patients’ condition.