HipBot – The design, development and control of a therapeutic robot for hip rehabilitation

The hip is the strongest joint of the human body. A wide range of disorders and fractures can affect the hip. The use of therapeutic robots has the potential to reduce the physical workload of rehabilitation and to improve repeatability. In this paper, a simple hip-joint rehabilitation robot (HipBot) is presented to perform combined movements of abduction/adduction and flexion/extension. HipBot has 5-DOF and can perform combined movements. This system can learn specific exercise motions through a GUI and perform them without the physiotherapist. In addition, HipBot is capable of performing rehabilitation on both right and left legs (individually). The simple mechanism covers the requirements of stability and robustness necessary for hip-joint rehabilitation. The mechatronic design and control technique are described. The robot system was tested in a small group of healthy subjects. The experimental results carried out on healthy subjects proved the high performance of the rehabilitation device and showed its great potential.