Upper limb rehabilitation using a planar cable-driven parallel robot with various rehabilitation strategies

Robotic technology became an important tool for rehabilitation especially for stroke patients. This paper presents development of three degrees-of-freedom cable-driven parallel robot (CDPR) for upper limb rehabilitation. Main features of the proposed rehabilitation robot are to provide relatively large workspace and to be less dangerous especially in the situation of robot's malfunction owing to its reduced inertia of a moving part. In addition, the cable-driven rehabilitation robot has many advantages such as transportability, low cost, low actuation power, safeness, large workspace and so on. In this paper, we analyzed the patient's joint movement during the passive rehabilitation using the developed CDPR. In addition, the paper presents the several types of rehabilitation therapy strategies and their implementation using the proposed CDPR system.