Abstract—According to development of medical treatment, the population of the elderly is increasing. Therefore, rehabilitation devices using soft pneumatic actuators for the disabled are actively researched and developed because of insufficient number of physical therapists (PT). The purpose of this study is to develop a home rehabilitation device that can be used by him/herself without PT. In the previous study, the wearable wrist rehabilitation device using flexible pneumatic cylinders was proposed and tested. The attitude control based on an analytical model of the device was also carried out. In this paper, in order to reduce the burden of patients, the light-weight and low-cost device which has a simplified attitude control system with a dead zone and low-friction type cylinders is proposed and tested.
 

Index Terms—wearable wrist rehabilitation device, low-friction type flexible pneumatic cylinder, simplified pneumatic driving system

Cite: Wataru Kobayashi, Jie Guo, Tetsuya Akagi, Shujiro Dohta, and Naoki Kato, "Development of Simplified Wearable Wrist Rehabilitation Device Using Low-Friction Type Flexible Pneumatic Cylinders," International Journal of Mechanical Engineering and Robotics Research, Vol. 6, No. 3, pp. 253-257, May 2017. DOI: 10.18178/ijmerr.6.3.253-257