Iranian Researchers Manufacture Device for Rehabilitation of Joints, Muscles

“We have built an active and adaptive joint and muscle rehabilitation device which has two canals of electrical stimulation with the ability to adjust the output current, calculate the torque of the patient's joint in active resistance and support movement, enjoys the ability to adjust the height and use it for all joints, and has an easy-to-use touch screen,” said Adel Parvizi Fard, the managing director of the knowledge-based company stationed at the Innovation Center of the Science and Technology Park of the Academic Center for Education, Culture and Research in Kermanshah.

Noting that the range of motion of the injured joint is improved with the help of this device, he said, “After the joint has recovered and its range of motion has returned to normal, the next step is to work on the patient's muscle, and adaptively, the amount of force that the muscle needs to apply to the joint in an isokinetic way.”

“Also, the axis in which the joint is placed is repaired with the help of this device; the affected joint moves in a reciprocating axis (to the extent that the patient is able to move),” Parvizi Fard stated.

“Actually, this device is like a multi-purpose physiotherapy device that we can adjust the opening and closing mode by controlling the electrical stimulation of the current and provide all of them as a complete package of rehabilitation services to the patient,” he underlined.

In a relevant development in August, Iranian researchers at University of Tehran succeeded in designing control algorithms for lower body rehabilitation exoskeletons for disabled people.

“I have designed one of the most up-to-date control algorithms for this category of external skeletons called Virtual Energy Regulator,” said Rezvan Nasiri, a member of the Faculty of Machine Intelligence and Robotics Department of the University of Tehran.

“This algorithm can coordinate with the user's performance and therefore has the best performance compared to other control algorithms developed so far,” she underlined.

Noting that most of the physically disabled people need lower body rehabilitation to walk or are unable to walk at all, Nasiri said that these people are the elderly, people with spinal cord injury, stroke-hit people, Parkinson's patients, etc.

“Our research group was able to propose, for the first time at the international level, a model of force distribution among muscles with 75% accuracy, and this is a big step in the direction of reducing research costs and accelerating research in the field of rehabilitation robots,” she added.

4155/v