Development of an enhanced leg muscle rehabilitation system.
This paper aims to develop an enhanced rehabilitation and assessment system for people with impaired leg muscles, and for people who need to improve their leg muscle function. Through interactive design and real time evaluation, medical staff can totally control the training situation for patients and therefore provide a better training program, so that overall a better treatment performance can be achieved. The system consists of four major parts. Sensory and signal conversion circuits convert the lever arm lengths and muscle strengths of the leg into a proper electronic signal and then deliver this to the computer. Then, the intelligent and interactive interface design lets a trainee complete the training process independently without the involvement of medical staff. In addition, the trainee can see the training results at the end of the training process on the computer screen. The training protection and evaluation mechanism effectively monitors the training situation, based on the individual status settings by the medical staff, and thus any further impairment can be avoided. The database management system is developed to store related personal data, system settings and training results, which can then be retrieved for control and assessment. In comparison to similar equipment the proposed system demonstrates a much better performance, particularly in system functions, accuracy, operation and costs.