The human arm kinematics and dynamics during daily activities - Toward a 7 DOF upper limb powered exoskeleton

Integrating human and robot into a single system offers remarkable opportunities for creating a new generation of assistive technology. Having obvious applications in rehabilitation medicine and virtual reality simulation, such a device would benefit both the healthy and disabled population. The aim of the research is to study the kinematics and the dynamics of the human arm during daily activities in a free and unconstrained environment as part of an on-going research involved in the design of a 7 degree of freedom (DOF) powered exoskeleton for the upper limb. The kinematics of the upper limb was acquired with a motion capture system while performing a wide verity of daily activities. Utilizing a model of the human as a 7 DOF system, the equations of motion were used to calculate joint torques given the arm kinematics. During positioning tasks, higher angular velocities were observed in the gross manipulation joints (the shoulder and elbow) as compared to the fine manipulation joints (the wrist). An inverted phenomenon was observed during fine manipulation in which the angular velocities of the wrist joint exceeded the angular velocities of the shoulder and elbow joints. Analyzing the contribution of individual terms of the arm's equations of motion indicate that the gravitational term is the most dominant term in these equations. The magnitudes of this term across the joints and the various actions is higher than the inertial, centrifugal, and Coriolis terms combined. Variation in object grasping (e.g. power grasp of a spoon) alters the overall arm kinematics in which other joints, such as the shoulder joint, compensate for lost dexterity of the wrist. The collected database along with the kinematics and dynamic analysis may provide the fundamental understanding for designing powered exoskeleton for the human arm.