Virtual platform technologies for evaluation of rehabilitation progress and for prosthetic control

Abstract

The on-line reproduction of the movements per-formed by a patient in virtual environments has been proposed for several applications, including the evaluation of new prosthetic control strategies, the training of prosthetic users and for new rehabilitation programs. Since the availability of the hardware and software technology necessary to implement various types of virtual environments, our laboratory has been interested in the development of a simulation environment which could be used as part of the rehabilitation treatment of lower limb amputees. Therefore, in this paper, a scaled prototype solution aimed at reproducing the movement of the lower limb during walking in a simulated environment was developed. A robotic simulation software was used and two forms of simulated limb control were tested: one used data from a hardware interface, collecting data from external inputs (sensors) and the other used electrophysiological signals. The soft-ware used was the free version of V REP and the hardware selected was the Arduino Mega. The implemented system complied with the requirements previously established and probed to be sufficiently versatile for the proposed application.