Development of a sEMG-Controlled Portable Exoskeleton System for Home-based Upper Limb Rehabilitation

As the aging population increases, the number of patients with upper limb hemiplegia is also increasing year by year. The robot-assisted elbow rehabilitation in improving upper limb function abilities in sub-acute hemiplegic patients is promising. In this paper, a surface electromyography (sEMG)-controlled portable robotic system for home-based upper limb rehabilitation is designed. According to the structural parameters of human body, a gear-driven wearable upper limb exoskeleton is designed and analyzed. The sEMG signal is adopted as the control signal to realize the natural and smooth human–robot interaction. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed system, the passive training experiment and the sEMG-based bilateral training experiment are carried out respectively, which also shows the feasibility of the proposed rehabilitation system in assisting the movements of the affected upper limb.