Manual Control for Motor Rehabilitation

In rehabilitation from motor paralysis, it is important to provide appropriate sensory feedback that the body moves as desired. Appropriate feedback causes synchronous neuron firing, resulting in the recovery of function. The idea of making the system move as desired has long been studied as manual control. In this paper, based on the results of considering the systems necessary for motor rehabilitation from the viewpoint of manual control, we constructed a motor rehabilitation system in which the cursor on the display moves by sticking out the tongue for dysphagia, and conducted experiments. As a result of the experiments with healthy participants, we were able to confirm the validity of the assumption of a simulation that human is linear systems with a primary delay-system. By adding a learning compensator to the system, we were able to make the cursor follow an ideal trajectory. On the other hand, a problem was found that start-up tracking near the target value was an issue. This was due to the non-negligible amount of dead time in the human and the system, and the fact that a lot of noise was introduced due to the characteristics of the system. © 2022 The Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan.