Preliminary evaluation of SensHand V1 in assessing motor skills performance in Parkinson Disease

Nowadays, the increasing old population 65+ as well as the pace imposed by work activities lead to a high number of people that have particular injuries for limbs. In addition to persistent or temporary disabilities related to accidental injuries we must take into account that part of the population suffers from motor deficits of the hands due to stroke or diseases of various clinical nature. The most recurrent technological solutions to measure the rehabilitation or skill motor performance of the hand are glove-based devices, able to faithfully capture the movements of the hand and fingers. This paper presents a system for hand motion analysis based on 9-axis complete inertial modules and dedicated microcontroller which are fixed on fingers and forearm. The technological solution presented is able to track the patients' hand motions in real-time and then to send data through wireless communication reducing the clutter and the disadvantages of a glove equipped with sensors through a different technological structure. The device proposed has been tested in the study of Parkinson's disease

A two DoF finger for a biomechatronic artificial hand

Current prosthetic hands are basically simple grippers with one or two degrees of freedom, which barely restore the capability of the thumb-index pinch. Although most amputees consider this performance as acceptable for usual tasks, there is ample room for improvement by exploiting recent progresses in mechatronics design and technology. We are developing a novel prosthetic hand featured by multiple degrees of freedom, tactile sensing capabilities, and distributed control. Our main goal is to pursue an integrated design approach in order to fulfill critical requirements such as cosmetics, controllability, low weight, low energy consumption and noiselessness. This approach can be synthesized by the definition "biomechatronic design", which means developing mechatronic systems inspired by living beings and able to work harmoniously with them. This paper describes the first implementation of one single finger of a future biomechatronic hand. The finger has a modular design, which allows to obtain hands with different degrees of freedom and grasping capabilities. Current developments include the implementation of a hand comprising three fingers (opposing thumb, index and middle) and an embedded controller

Influence of the skin thickness on tactile shape discrimination

10.1109/BioRob.2012.6290938Proceedings of the IEEE RAS and EMBS International Conference on Biomedical Robotics and Biomechatronics1681-168

Effects of different upper limb robot-aided approaches in chronic hemiparetic patients

17th Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine European Congress, Venice, Italy, 23 - 27 May 2010