CURE: A Cable-Driven Upper-Limb Rehabilitation Exoskeleton for Assisting ADLs in Home-Based Environment

Various upper limb wearable robots have been de-veloped to promote rehabilitation effectiveness. Some are devoted to single-joint rehabilitation with simple structure, while others target multi-joint rehabilitation with bulky size and complex frameworks. A multi-joint wearable robot is desired to facilitate home-based upper-limb rehabilitation. In this paper, a light-weight and compact wrist-elbow exoskeleton is designed for home-based activity of daily life (ADL)-oriented upper-limb rehabilitation. This exoskeleton utilizes a cable-driven actuation system to locate the motors in the backpack part and reduces the physical burden on the user's arm. Three motors actuate the movement of three degrees of freedom (DoFs), elbow flex-ion/extension, pronation/supination, and wrist flexion/extension. Three IMUs are mounted on the exoskeleton's hand, forearm, and upper arm parts to capture the exoskeleton's movement. An experiment with healthy subjects was conducted to validate that this proposed upper limb rehabilitation exoskeleton can accurately assist the ADLs of patients by simultaneously helping the movement of three DoFs, and the root mean square error (RMSE) of the tracking error was less than 3° for all DoFs. The proposed upper limb exoskeleton can promote the effectiveness and convenience of ADL-oriented rehabilitation.