Development of novel control strategies for robotic upper-limb rehabilitation of patients with orthopedic injuries

The principal purpose of this thesis was to develop and validate a new exercises’ library for the upper-limb rehabilitation of orthopedic patients to implement on platform NEUROExos, a robotic elbow exoskeleton developed at The BioRobotics Institute, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna. In the first part, a study of the anatomy of the upper-limb and of the most common injuries at the elbow and shoulder has been done. Then the attention was focused on the existing rehabilitation techniques, especially on robotic ones. Starting from the current set of passive rehabilitation exercises, that have been tested with neurologic patients on the platform, and after a couple of brainstorming meetings with medical doctors from the Versilia Hospital, the rehabilitation program has been developed. The entire library is able to follow the patient in all the phases of the rehabilitation: from the passive mobilization, to the specific muscle training to the error enhancing techniques. The code, developed in Labview environment, has been tested on 7 healthy subjects. After the experimental session, the data have been analyzed with a Matlab code and the results listed in the Chapter 4