During the last years, there has been a relevant progress in motor learning and functional recovery after the occurrence of a brain lesion. Rehabilitation of motor function has been associated to motor learning that occurs during repetitive, frequent and intensive training. Contralaterally controlled functional electrical stimulation (CCFES) is a new therapy designed to improve the recovery of paretic limbs after stroke, that could provide repetitive training-based therapies and has been developed to control the upper and lower limbs movements in response to user's intentionality. Electromyography (EMG) signals reflect directly the human motion intention, so it can be used as input information to control a CCFES system. Implementation of the EMG-based pattern recognition is not easy to be accomplished due to some difficulties, among them that the activity level of each muscle for a certain motion is different between each person. Inertial Measurement Units (IMU) is a kind of wearable sensors that are used to gather movement data. IMUs could provide valuable kinematic information in an EMG-based pattern recognition process to improve classification. This work describes the use of IMUS to improve detecting motion intention from EMG data. Results shows that myoelectric algorithm using information from IMUs was better in classification of seven movements at the upper-limb level that algorithm using only EMG data.

Biomechanical loading, in particular, viscous loading of the upper limb has been proposed in the literature as a means for suppressing pathologic tremor. It is expected that an improvement on manipulative function can be obtained by reducing the tremorous motion associated to some neurological disorders. This article presents two non-grounded control strategies to suppress tremor by means of a orthotic (wearable) exoskeleton. These two strategies are based on biomechanical loading and notch filtering of tremor via internal forces. Both controls strategies are evaluated and validated on the robotic exoskeleton called WOTAS (wearable orthosis for tremor assessment and suppression). At the end, results obtained in the pre-clinical trials and conclusions of this study are presented

There is a need for wearable powered upper limb exoskeletons able to apply forces to the upper limb for use by people with disabilities and/or limb weakness or injury. The robotic exoskeleton called WOTAS (Wearable Orthosis for Tremor Assessment and Suppression) presented in this paper will provide a means of testing non-grounded control strategies in order to help these people. For instance, biomechanical loading, in particular, viscous loading of the upper limb has been proposed in the literature as a means for suppressing pathologic tremor. This article describes in detail the general concept for WOTAS, outlining the special features of the design and selection of system components.