Abstract
This research work focusses on recovery of human arm movement loss. In today's world, there has been an increase in the usage of domestic purpose robots for assisting human activities. Such robots are more effective for physically handicapped people. Sometimes during an accident, person may suffer from a stroke. A stroke occurs when there is a blood clot which blocks the flow of blood due to which a blood vessel breaks, interrupting flow to a particular area of the brain. Functions performed by that area of the brain are lost which include speech, movement, and memory. Robotic rehabilitation has been an effective method since the early 1990’s and is proving to have a significant effect on the fast recovery of stroke affected patients. The wearable exoskeleton robot for upper extremity rehabilitation is taken as the research object. The proposed idea demonstrates the measurement of various position of the upper limb using Open Computer Vision Library and is verified through the simulation of the exoskeleton model in Simulink. A real time elbow joint arm movement has been demonstrated for the actual exoskeleton. In future, various arm movements would be measured and thereby help in moving the exoskeleton in different directions. Potential applications of the exoskeleton as a wearable robot include: 1) Exoskeletons can be used to treat the patient without the presence of the therapist. 2) A haptic device in virtual reality simulation. 3) a master device for teleoperation.