Improving Effectiveness of Robot-Assisted Ankle Rehabilitation via Biomechanical Assessment and Interaction Control
type: CreativeWork
description: The human ankle joint plays a significant role in maintaining body balance during ambulation, but it is particularly susceptible to musculoskeletal and neurological disorders. A general rehabilitation program for ankle injuries requires intensive efforts from therapists and patients over prolonged sessions. Robot-assisted rehabilitation solutions, as therapeutic adjuncts to facilitate clinical practice, have been actively researched in the past few decades and provide an overdue transformation of rehabilitation from labour-intensive operations to technology-assisted operations. Various rehabilitation devices have therefore been developed for the treatment of ankle injuries to reduce the physical workload of therapists and supplement the resources required to facilitate a comprehensive rehabilitation regime so that adequate therapy can be delivered to patients. However, the effectiveness of existing ankle rehabilitation robots is limited by a variety of shortcomings including kinematic incompatibility (misaligned centre of rotation of the robot and the ankle joint), non-compliant actuation, less than three rotational degrees of freedom (DOFs), and the lack of real-time ankle assessment and adaptive interaction training schemes. This research aims to improve the effectiveness of robot-assisted therapy for the treatment of musculoskeletal and neurological ankle injuries. The fundamental technology is the development of an intrinsically-compliant ankle robot with real-time biomechanical assessment and interaction control. The current device is named the Ankle Assessment and Rehabilitation Robot (AARR). The AARR has a bio-inspired design, with the functions of both assessment and rehabilitation, devised after a systematic review of a variety of ankle rehabilitation devices. Mechanically, this novel robot is designed with flexibility in generating varying training ranges of motion (ROMs), and employs four intrinsically-compliant Festo fluidic muscles (FFMs) that mimic ske…
abstract: The human ankle joint plays a significant role in maintaining body balance during ambulation, but it is particularly susceptible to musculoskeletal and neurological disorders. A general rehabilitation program for ankle injuries requires intensive efforts from therapists and patients over prolonged sessions. Robot-assisted rehabilitation solutions, as therapeutic adjuncts to facilitate clinical practice, have been actively researched in the past few decades and provide an overdue transformation of rehabilitation from labour-intensive operations to technology-assisted operations. Various rehabilitation devices have therefore been developed for the treatment of ankle injuries to reduce the physical workload of therapists and supplement the resources required to facilitate a comprehensive rehabilitation regime so that adequate therapy can be delivered to patients. However, the effectiveness of existing ankle rehabilitation robots is limited by a variety of shortcomings including kinematic incompatibility (misaligned centre of rotation of the robot and the ankle joint), non-compliant actuation, less than three rotational degrees of freedom (DOFs), and the lack of real-time ankle assessment and adaptive interaction training schemes. This research aims to improve the effectiveness of robot-assisted therapy for the treatment of musculoskeletal and neurological ankle injuries. The fundamental technology is the development of an intrinsically-compliant ankle robot with real-time biomechanical assessment and interaction control. The current device is named the Ankle Assessment and Rehabilitation Robot (AARR). The AARR has a bio-inspired design, with the functions of both assessment and rehabilitation, devised after a systematic review of a variety of ankle rehabilitation devices. Mechanically, this novel robot is designed with flexibility in generating varying training ranges of motion (ROMs), and employs four intrinsically-compliant Festo fluidic muscles (FFMs) that mimic ske…
author: Zhang, Mingming
license: https://researchspace.auckland.ac.nz/docs/uoa-docs/rights.htm
date published: 2016
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:04:15Z
provider: University of Auckland
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: ResearchSpace@Auckland

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: https://hdl.handle.net/2292/28271