Development and comprehensive evaluation of a new spring-steel-driven glove for grasping assistance during activities of daily living

Research Status and Prospect of Finger Rehabilitation Machinery

About 80% of stroke patients have hand motor dysfunction, and wearing finger rehabilitation machinery can enable patients to carry out efficient passive rehabilitation training independently. At present, many typical finger rehabilitation machines have been developed, and clinical experiments have confirmed the effectiveness of mechanically assisted finger rehabilitation. In this paper, the finger rehabilitation machinery will be classified in the actuation mode, and the terminal traction drive/motor drive/spring drive/rope drive/memory alloy drive/electroactive material drive/hydraulic drive/pneumatic drive technology and its typical applications are analyzed. Study the structure, control methods, overlap between mechanical bending nodes and finger joints, training modes, response speed, and driving force of various types of finger rehabilitation machinery. The advantages and disadvantages of various actuation methods of finger rehabilitation machinery are summarized. Finally, the difficulties and opportunities faced by the future development of finger rehabilitation machinery are prospected. In general, with the continuous improvement of quality of life, stroke patients need flexible, segmented control, accurate bending, multi-training mode, fast response, and good driving force finger rehabilitation machinery. This will also be a future hot research direction.

A Preliminary Study to Design and Evaluate Pneumatically Controlled Soft Robotic Actuators for a Repetitive Hand Rehabilitation Task

A stroke is an infarction in the cortical region of the brain that often leads to isolated hand paresis. This common side effect renders individuals compromised in their ability to actively flex or extend the fingers of the affected hand. While there are currently published soft robotic glove designs, this article proposed a unique design that allows users to self-actuate their therapy due to the ability to re-extend the hand using a layer of resistive flexible steel. The results showed a consistently achieved average peak of 75° or greater for each finger while the subjects’ hands were at rest during multiple trials of pneumatic assisted flexion. During passive assisted testing, human subject testing on 10 participants showed that these participants were able to accomplish 80.75% of their normal active finger flexion range with the steel-layer-lined pneumatic glove and 87.07% with the unlined pneumatic glove on average when neglecting outliers. An addition of the steel layer lowered the blocked tip force by an average of 18.13% for all five fingers. These data show strong evidence that this glove would be appropriate to advance to human subject testing on those who do have post stroke hand impairments.