Armor (Armorthese)

Armor (Armor-thosis) is a movement robot for stroke patients and patients with traumatic brain injury, suffering from paralysis of the arm. The robot helps the patient to learn meaningful movement patterns again and to retrain these movements.
Armor is especially characterized particularly by the following properties:

• coverage of the entire upper extremity (shoulder to fingers)
• easy adjustment to physique of the patient
• 12 degrees of freedom (DOF)
  • 8 activ DOFs
  • 4 passiv DOFs
• 3 different operational modes
  • Master-Slave mode
  • Sample & Playback funtion
  • „Teach In“ mode
• permanent recording of movement parameters

The neurologists of the Landeskrankenhaus Hochzirl, under the direction of Leopold Saltuari, the head of the Department of Neurological acute treatment, ordered with the development of the robot Armor at the Austrian Research Centers Seibersdorf (now Austrian Institute of Technology). Stefan Mina was responsible for the hardware–side development and Otto Weichselbaum took over the implementation of the software for controlling. The clinical trial with Armor shows promising results.