Development of Robotic Rehabilitation Device for Spasticity Treatment of Acute Spinal Cord Injury Patients.

As spasticity is a major cause of illness in patients that suffer from spinal cord injury (SCI), there are several limitations in the present robotic-based therapy for the treatment of acute SCI patients. A large literature is present for the use of full body exoskeletons, but due to their limitations such as uneasiness due to repetitive motion, does not meet the anthropometric range. As manual therapy is tiresome, a need for ankle-foot therapy exoskeleton was felt and Ankle-Foot Orthosis was developed. This paper presents an ankle-foot therapy exoskeleton device for spasticity treatment of acute SCI patients to reduce the manual efforts of physiotherapists. The proposed device has one Degree of Freedom (DOF) in the sagittal plane in ankle joint. This paper analyses the control design of the prototype and clinical trial results on SCI patients, which show that the proposed prototype is viable in improving the range of ankle motion alleviating the spasticity with p = 0.000365. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]