A rehabilitation exercise robot for treating low back pain

Low back pain is one of the world's most serious health problems. Conservative methods are recommended for back pain, and stabilization exercise as one of these methods has been proven to be effective. The “big 3” exercises are proven stabilization exercises, and it is able to train most of the muscles associated with low back stability. However, they are hard to be performed by some patients because the big 3 require sufficient strength in the upper and lower limbs as well as in the low back to maintain their postures. In this paper, we propose a rehabilitation robot SERA (Stabilization Exercise Robot Assistance system) to compensate for this shortcoming, and we describe the robot's developments and experiments. The proposed robot is designed to achieve effects similar to the big 3. The robot also ensures active exercises by voluntary control of the exerciser and provides anti-gravity force generated by series elastic actuators (SEAs) in order to adjust the exercise load. Experiments using surface electromyograph (sEMG) sensors with three subjects show the results for these features.