Study on upper limb rehabilitation system based on surface EMG

Abstract During the rehabilitation process, it is essential to accurately judge a patient’s recovery in a timely manner. A reasonable and matched training program is significant in the development of rehabilitation system. This paper presents a new upper limb rehabilitation training system, which consists of an upper limb rehabilitation training device, a current detection circuit, a motor speed test circuit, a surface EMG (sEMG) sensor, and a dSPACE HIL simulation platform. The real-time output torque of the servo motor is calculated by using the motor’s real-time current and speed, in order to monitor the patient’s training situation. The signal of sEMG is collected in real time and is processed with root mean square (RMS) to characterize the degree of muscle activation. Based on this rehabilitation system, maximum voluntary contraction (MVC) experiments, passive training experiments under different speeds, and active training experiments under different damping are studied. The results show that this new system performs real-time and accurate monitoring of a patient’s training situation. It can also assess a patient’s recovery through muscle activation. To a certain extent, this system provides a platform for research and development of rehabilitation medical engineering.