Design of a Left-Right-Independent Pedaling Machine for Lower-Limb Rehabilitation

This paper presents a new lower-limb rehabilitation machine to meet the rehabilitation needs of hemiplegic patients. First, we select a left-right-independent rotary pedaling mechanism to ease rehabilitation. And adaptation to the physical condition of a user. Then, we design and fabricate a half model of a lower-limb rehabilitation machine with ergonomics in mind. We use the combination of non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) and non-negative double singular value decomposition as an analysis tool to calculate muscle synergies for sEMG signals of walking muscles, and use cosine similarity to evaluate the similarity between walking and pedaling activities. A comparison between the experimental results of walking experiment pedaling clarifies the effectiveness of pedaling in gait rehabilitation. To further improve the similarity between walking and pedaling, we introduced the double integration of an sEMG signal and used a Fourier series to describe the relationship between the load input and the rotational angle for the first time. Experimental results showed that the similarity was improved by this method compared to other load-setting methods.