EVA Glove Research Team

The goal of the basic research portion of the extravehicular activity (EVA) glove research program is to gain a greater understanding of the kinematics of the hand, the characteristics of the pressurized EVA glove, and the interaction of the two. Examination of the literature showed that there existed no acceptable, non-invasive method of obtaining accurate biomechanical data on the hand. For this reason a project was initiated to develop magnetic resonance imaging as a tool for biomechanical data acquisition and visualization. Literature reviews also revealed a lack of practical modeling methods for fabric structures, so a basic science research program was also initiated in this area

A magnetic compatible supernumerary robotic finger for functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) acquisitions: Device description and preliminary results

The Supernumerary robotic limbs are a recently introduced class of wearable robots that, differently from traditional prostheses and exoskeletons, aim at adding extra effectors (i.e., arms, legs, or fingers) to the human user, rather than substituting or enhancing the natural ones. However, it is still undefined whether the use of supernumerary robotic limbs could specifically lead to neural modifications in brain dynamics. The illusion of owning the part of body has been already proven in many experimental observations, such as those relying on multisensory integration (e.g., rubber hand illusion), prosthesis and even on virtual reality. In this paper we present a description of a novel magnetic compatible supernumerary robotic finger together with preliminary observations from two functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments, in which brain activity was measured before and after a period of training with the robotic device, and during the use of the novel MRI-compatible version of the supernumerary robotic finger. Results showed that the usage of the MR-compatible robotic finger is safe and does not produce artifacts on MRI images. Moreover, the training with the supernumerary robotic finger recruits a network of motor-related cortical regions (i.e. primary and supplementary motor areas), hence the same motor network of a fully physiological voluntary motor gestures