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.