A full upper limb robotic exoskeleton for reaching and grasping rehabilitation triggered by MI-BCI

In this paper we propose a full upper limb exoskeleton for motor rehabilitation of reaching, grasping and releasing in post-stroke patients. The presented system takes into account the hand pre-shaping for object affordability and it is driven by patient's intentional control through a self-paced asynchronous Motor Imagery based Brain Computer Interface (MI-BCI). The developed antropomorphic eight DoFs exoskeleton (two DoFs for the hand, two for the wrist and four for the arm) allows full support of the manipulation activity at the level of single upper limb joint. In this study, we show the feasibility of the proposed system through experimental rehabilitation sessions conducted with three chronic post-stroke patients. Results show the potential of the proposed system for being introduced in a rehabilitation protocol.