Métodos computacionais para controle de impedância e admitância em sistemas de apoio à reabilitação neuromotora

Abstract

This project consists on creating the hardware and software of a supportive device for the upper-limb rehabilitation for hemiparesis affected post-stroke patients. The initial challenge was presented by a PhD student at Biolab, who read about such system in a paper [13] and suggested that having one of those equipments in our laboratory would be very helpful for future physiotherapist students who do research on motor skills acquisition and reacquisition, specially on post-stroke patients, which already is a subject studied at Biolab. Following that, the initial article was studied and other related ones were as well, in order to try and find any other equipments which could be better for our purposes or any enhancements that could be done to the initial one. After that it was decided that the one described by Campolo, Domenico, et al. [13] was indeed the best one for the labs intentions. Therefore the schematics provided in the article describing the structure were used as the base for building a similar one, using the same kind of mechanical poly system and we also experimented with different types of motors for such structure, settling with DC ones at the end. However, for the software portion of the project, no details were given, except the mathematical equations describing the force vectors which would be applied to the handle in the final system due to each motors rotation. Therefore, the software for both the micro-controller and the desktop app had to be done from scratch in arduino and C# respectively. As the whole hardware and software were done and in a functioning state the final adjustments were made and the experiments for testing the system’s performance could begin. With such experiments it was possible to verify the equipment’s ability to act as either an admittance in order to help the patient move or an impedance to make the movement harder, helping the patient to strengthen its muscles, as well as applying a force field over the whole area of the equipment, demanding a better motor control from the subject.