Design of an exercise glove for hand rehabilitation using spring mechanism

Hand muscles do not perform their functions because of different reasons such as disease, injury and trauma. It is implemented some treatments for the hand therapy at hospitals and rehabilitation centers. One of these is using orthotic or robotic devices for rehabilitation. One of the important issues for these devices, placed on the user's hand, is force transmitting. Design and manufacturing process of a novel exercise glove for hand rehabilitation has been presented in this study. Original component of the glove is the spring mechanism for the force transmitting. Finger exercises based on flexion and extension movement can be performed using the new glove. The spring mechanism is driven by user's muscle strength. The glove could be used for especially post-stroke rehabilitation. Besides, this glove can be integrated to other actuator systems easily, so both active and passive exercises can be performed

ServoSEA concept: Cheap, miniature series-elastic actuators for orthotic, prosthetic and robotic hands

For interactive humanoids, rehabilitation robots, and orthotic and prosthetic devices, the human-robot interaction is an essential but challenging element. Compliant Series-Elastic Actuators (SEAs) are ideal to power such devices due to their low impedance and smoothness of generated forces. In this paper we present the ServoSEA, which is a miniature Series-Elastic Actuator (SEA) based on cheap RC servos, and which is useful for actuation of orthotic, prosthetic or robotic hands. RC servos are complete packages that come with rotary motor and sensor and have an integrated control board to control the output angle. In the ServoSEA, a small rotational spring is attached to the output shaft and the internal rotary sensor is relocated to measure the spring deflection. These small modifications immediately make the integrated control board behave as a series-elastic torque controller. Here we present several design alternatives and report on the performance of our implementation that will be used in the active SCRIPT wrist and hand orthosis. The performance measurements showed that feedforward control of the example implementation of the ServoSEA results in acceptable, though not perfect, force tracking behavior. It is clear that although the ServoSEA concept is universal, final performance strongly depends on the quality of the original RC servo

SCRIPT passive orthosis: design of interactive hand and wrist exoskeleton for rehabilitation at home after stroke

Recovery of functional hand movements after stroke is directly linked to rehabilitation duration and intensity. Continued therapy at home has the potential to increase both. For many patients this requires a device that helps them overcome the hyperflexion of wrist and fingers that is limiting their ability to open and use their hand. We developed an interactive hand and wrist orthosis for post-stroke rehabilitation that provides compliant and adaptable extension assistance at the wrist and fingers, interfaces with motivational games based on activities of daily living, is integrated with an off-the-shelf mobile arm support and includes novel wrist and finger actuation mechanisms. During the iterative development, multiple prototypes have been evaluated by therapists in clinical settings and used intensively and independently by 33 patients at home. This paper details the final design of the SCRIPT passive orthosis resulting from these efforts