Design and Control of a Novel Pneumatic Soft Upper Limb Exoskeleton for Rehabilitation

The upper limb joints are easy to dislocate in the early stage of stroke. The protection of upper limb joints is particularly important in the early rehabilitation. This paper proposed a novel upper soft exoskeleton system, which can solve the risk of dislocation of the shoulder joint in the early stage of rehabilitation. The soft exoskeleton protected the shoulder joints through multi-chamber airbag mechanisms and designed a branches mechanism at elbow joints for the upper limb movement. The rehabilitation of the soft exoskeleton was the massage of upper limbs by filling and deflating the air chambers while the thin-film pressure sensors to collect and feedback the pressure of human epidermis. The kinematic analysis of the soft exoskeleton was established, and the substitution of data was done to verify the correctness of the mechanism of the soft exoskeleton. As a result, the experiments showed that the pressure sensor data was basically consistent with the theoretical values. The massage effect was remarkable, which was suitable for the rehabilitation of stroke patients at different stages.