Wearable Passive Cable-Driven Wrist Rehabilitation Robot: Design and Preliminary Experiments

The subject of this investigation is RehaWrist.q, a wearable wrist rehabilitation robot with 3 degrees of freedom (DoF), characterised by its small size, lightweight, and lack of external support structures. The effectiveness of the robot design is assessed through a dedicated passive configuration along with an experimental setup. The robot workspace is suitable for rehabilitation exercises, albeit falling short of the maximum range of motion achievable by a healthy individual. The study underlines the potential of the overall concept, but recommends the implementation of an active actuation system that continuously and automatically adjusts cable tension to fully exploit the device’s capabilities.