Eventos Anais de eventos
COBEM 2023
27th International Congress of Mechanical Engineering
Ankle rehabilitation robots and its main features: a review
Submission Author:
Ricardo Halla II , MG
Co-Authors:
Ricardo Halla II, Rogério Sales Gonçalves
Presenter: Ricardo Halla II
doi://10.26678/ABCM.COBEM2023.COB2023-0670
Abstract
Stroke, spinal chord injury, traumatic brain injury, sports injuries, traffic accidents, and congenital foot deformities such as clubfoot are the main causes of ankle disabilities, which cause its loss of motion and weakness. This condition leads to impaired patterns of gait, quality of life degradation, and daily life activity restrictions. To gradually recover the ankle joint’s functionality, patients take long, repetitive, and intensive sessions of physiotherapy in specialized centers of rehabilitation. However, the traditional rehabilitation process has some limitations, such as: demanding a great number of physiotherapists; personnel fatigue; one-to-one patient and doctor assistance; and a lack of an objective and quantitative method of analyzing the patient’s progression history during the whole period of therapy. Thus, the use of robotic devices to provide support in ankle rehabilitation comes as an alternative to solve or at least attenuate these problems. Such an alternative could relieve physiotherapists’ exhaustion, allow therapists to aid multiple subjects at time, and assure an approach to measure, record, and store patients’ data progress during the rehabilitation procedures. This review paper aims to report the leading researches on robotic devices to aid the ankle rehabilitation process. Another goal is to classify such surveyed devices according to their driving actuator, motion capabilities, security mechanisms, ankle axis rotation matching, control strategy, and degree of freedom. The method consists of researching the main articles at Scopus with "ankle", "rehabilitation" and "robot" as keywords since 2019. Results showed a variety of ankle rehabilitation devices that could be classified and presented as a table to ease the reader’s analysis. The table contains some essential and relevant aspects of the researched devices. The primary highlight is the classification of each of these robotic devices according to its main attributes and features. Finally, it serves as a guide for ankle rehabilitation researchers who wish to compare different robotic manipulators based on many aspects and characteristics.
Keywords
ankle, Rehabilitation, Robotics, review, classification
