A Novel Wearable Upper-Limb Rehabilitation Assistance Exoskeleton System Driven by Fluidic Muscle Actuators

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Author

Your work has a good idea but your presentation must be overcome the following notes:

1. The introduction is very long without explaining the fundamental concept of your work and background; therefore must be rewritten.

2. must be added two items: Problem statement and Methodology.

3. the solution of Inverse kinematics in Equations 3 to 18 has the same main steps lost therefore the complete solution can be get by reference (  Y. I. Al Mashhadany, “Design and analysis of 7-DOF human-link manipulator based on hybrid intelligent controller,” SPIIRAS Proceedings, vol. 19, no. 4, PP: 774-802, 2020 doi: https://doi.org/10.15622/sp.2020.19.4.3  )

4. the results have the following Notes:

   A. The EMG signal must preset the results for identification and recognition of movements according to this signal.

B. EMG signal processing must be present.

C. you present the practical results and must add the detials parts of the device connection.

D. Must added the detailed video for installation of your real-time work and your practical results.

E. the error signal of your controller.

F. The comparison between your controller and a simple PID controller

5. your discussion of results is very weak.

6. the conclusion must rewrite according to your best results.

Regards

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors proposed four-DOF WURAES to aid the rehabilitation of the shoulder and elbow joints. They used a single FMA with a torsion spring module to drive each joint. he designed WURAES has a simple design and a low cost and is safe, lightweight, and portable. They built up an excellent model and also compared the experimental and simulation results. This paper is instructive to other researchers.  

1. in the introduction, I think the authors have mentioned the FMA. one small thing is that except for the McKibben fluidic artificial muscle, I think other fluidic actuators should be mentioned, like Eccentric actuators driven by stacked electrohydrodynamic pumps or Fluidic rolling robots using voltage-driven oscillating liquid.

2. I am curious about how the authors evaluate the angles of shoulders and elbows in figure 23 and figure.24.

3. The reasons why they choose the Mckibben fluidic actuators and proxy-based output feedback sliding-mode control are still unclear. 

4. They propose a nice controlling algorithm, which requires a comparable algorithm. Only from the results of figure 23 and figure 24, the simple PID might be enough. 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors have done a nice reply. No further revision is necessary.