The design of a novel tilt seat for inversion therapy

Inversion therapy has attracted the attention for its application, in combination to rehabilitation therapy, to the treatment of back pain. Several tilt tables have been designed and commercialized for this scope, either motorized or gravitational. In this paper we present the mechatronic design and prototype of a novel tilt seat to be used for inversion therapy. The proposed device shows substantial improvements with respect conventional available tilt tables. It is actuated and controlled and is capable to perform static and intermittent inversion for any inclination defined by the end-user. The seat unit can be rocket forwardly and backwardly with full rotation of 360 degrees. Furthermore, the upright and inverted configurations are much more comfortable than those obtained with conventional tilt tables. In this paper a control scheme and numerical and experimental tests of the system are also shown