A hybrid NMES-exoskeleton for real objects interaction

Clinicians constantly face the need to rehabilitate stroke patients to re-establish coordinate reach and grasp. Rehabilitation, to be effective, requires intensive and repetitive tasks. Assist-as-needed motion control for reach and grasp assistance are usually treated separately, and mostly based on virtual reality games. To increase the clinical outcome, we designed flexible modules for a clinical platform, able to provide synchronous reach and grasp support and to interact with common objects. An upper limb exoskeleton provides the reaching support, a NMES-system based on electrode arrays provides grasp control by means of muscle contraction, and a satellite robot presents the objects to be grasped. Specific rehabilitation tasks can be implemented by taking advantage of the possibility to quantify the support needed by patients, and to modulate both the mechanical and NMES support over the reachable workspace.