Neuromuscular and sensorimotor degeneration caused by stroke or any other disease significantly reduce the physical, cognitive, and social well-being across the life span. Mostly, therapeutic interventions are employed in order to restore the lost degrees-of-freedom (DOF) caused by such impairments and automating these therapeutic tasks through exoskeletons/robots is becoming a common practice. However, aligning these robotic devices with the complex anatomical and geometrical motions of the joints is very challenging. At the same time, a good alignment is required in order to establish a better synergy of human-exoskeleton system for an effective intervention procedure. In this paper, a case study of an exoskeleton and shoulder joint alignment were studied through different size and orientation impairment models through motion capture data and musculoskeletal modeling in OpenSim. A preliminary result indicates that shoulder elevation is very sensitive to misalignment and varies with shoulder joint axes orientation; this is partly due to drastic displacement of the upper arm axes with respect to the shoulder joint origin during elevation. Additional study and analysis is required to learn any possible restraint on shoulder elevation that could potentially help in the exoskeleton development.

This study focuses on a musculoskeletal analysis of human lower extremity and associated muscle forces during different rehabilitative tasks and exoskeleton alignment models. By changing the size and orientation of the impairment levels that could be caused by the misalignment of the exoskeleton and biological knee joint, muscle stress variations were observed. This indicates an increase in force such as that generated by the Vastus lateralis muscle up to 4.3% due to a 5 mm lateral offset from an anatomically healthy knee joint location. In another setting, while a subject moved the shank through a circular trajectory using an exoskeleton support, muscle strain due to misalignment was reflected at the rectus femoris with a variation of 44%, the biceps femoris large head with 32% and the gastrocnemius muscles with 31–33% variation. These results suggest that misalignment should be taken into account while using exoskeletons with certain trajectories for knee rehabilitation purposes. Based on the shortcomings of conventional physiotherapeutic tasks, the outcome of this study can be helpful in prescribing an impactful yet convenient configuration toward a safe and promising rehabilitation process. Assessment of exoskeleton alignment during rehabilitation is important to ensure user safety with a better therapy efficacy.

One type of effective muscular disorders therapy is horseback riding. The main objective of the present study is developing a physiotherapeutic simulator (concept proof) instead of a real horse though employing the Electroencephalography (EEG) amplifier and inertial motion capture system (IMCS). In the experiment, the professional and non-professional rider’s body movements and brain-behaviors monitored during the horseback riding simulator. The computational analysis for identifying the alterations of the pelvic area activity among two group riders were considered based on the IMCS. The EEG system was used for investigating the brain signals of the experienced horseback rider who had never experienced using horse simulator. For this purpose, the following experiments were handled, representing body and brain-behavior. As a result, it was concluded, that inexperienced horseback riders tend to make movement mistakes while riding a simulator, which may cause asymmetry shift in external hip and back regions. The study of EEG shows that the frontal lobes, which are responsible for intelligence and concentration were activated. Also, the temporal and the parietal areas of the brain which are responsible for movements and vision were activated significantly, respectively.