Diseño y construcción de un prototipo mecatrónico para rehabilitación pasiva en flexión-extensión y pronación-supinación de antebrazo.

Abstract

Musculoskeletal diseases affect the muscles, bones, joints, and associated tissues such as tendons and ligaments. These types of injuries not only affect older people, they can occur at any time in life either due to repetitive movements or more serious cases such as injuries from accidents that generate some type of fracture. In many cases, these injuries require surgical intervention and a rehabilitation process to be treated. The objective of rehabilitation therapy is to restore full function for one or more parts of the body, there are external factors that negatively affect the rehabilitation process such as the availability of the specialist, failures or lack of equipment to use in the process, difficulties in the transport of the patient to reach the rehabilitation site. As a consequence of these factors, the cost of therapies increases, patients drop out, incomplete or poorly done rehabilitations, and this negatively affects the patient's illness or injury. In the present work, a mechatronic prototype for passive forearm rehabilitation is proposed that manages to carry out rehabilitation routines of flexion-extension and pronation-supination movements, allowing the replication of biomechanical conditions for an efficient process and thus guaranteeing total restoration of movement. The kinematic model of the rehabilitation device is found, performing the analysis of position, speed and acceleration of each of the elements of our prototype without considering the force that causes our movements. This prototype will be used once the patient passes the immobilization phase and can begin to perform the movements. To ensure that the prototype allows the emulation of flexion-extension and pronation-supination movements, the mechanical structure is designed complying with the parameters established by the analysis of the kinematics and the analysis of synthesis of mechanisms. It should be noted that once the structure of the prototype is obtained, it continues to simulate so that it can be graphically verified that our prototype automatically performs the initially proposed movements. Once the simulation has been carried out, the prototype is built taking into account all the design conditions, selecting materials, PCB designs, respective programming, final assembly of the device and finally testing and presentation of the device.