Enabling individuals who are living with reduced mobility of the hand to utilize portable exoskeletons at home has the potential to deliver rehabilitation therapies with a greater intensity and relevance to activities of daily living. Various hand exoskeleton designs have been explored in the past, however, devices have remained nonportable and cumbersome for the intended users. Here we investigate a remote actuation system for wearable hand exoskeletons, which moves weight from the weakened limb to the shoulders, reducing the burden on the user and improving portability. A push-pull Bowden cable was used to transmit actuator forces from a backpack to the hand with strict attention paid to total system weight, size, and the needs of the target population. We present the design and integration of this system into a previously presented hand exoskeleton, as well as its characterization. Integration of remote actuation reduced the exoskeleton weight by 56% to 113g without adverse effects to functionality. Total actuation system weight was kept to 754g. The loss of positional accuracy inherent with Bowden cable transmissions was compensated for through closed loop positional control of the transmission output. The achieved weight reduction makes hand exoskeletons more suitable to the intended user, which will permit the study of their effectiveness in providing long duration, high intensity, and targeted rehabilitation as well as functional assistance.

Design and Characterization of a Lightweight and Fully Portable Remote Actuation System for Use With a Hand Exoskeleton

The development of dynamic hand orthoses is a fast-growing field of research and has resulted in many different devices. A large and diverse solution space is formed by the various mechatronic components which are used in these devices. They are the result of making complex design choices within the constraints imposed by the application, the environment and the patient’s individual needs. Several review studies exist that cover the details of specific disciplines which play a part in the developmental cycle. However, a general collection of all endeavors around the world and a structured overview of the solution space which integrates these disciplines is missing. In this study, a total of 165 individual dynamic hand orthoses were collected and their mechatronic components were categorized into a framework with a signal, energy and mechanical domain. Its hierarchical structure allows it to reach out towards the different disciplines while connecting them with common properties. Additionally, available arguments behind design choices were collected and related to the trends in the solution space. As a result, a comprehensive overview of the used mechatronic components in dynamic hand orthoses is presented.

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A structured overview of trends and technologies used in dynamic hand orthoses.

The present work, which describes the mechatronic design and development of a novel rehabilitation robotic exoskeleton hand, aims to present a solution for neuromusculoskeletal rehabilitation. It p...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.5772/62404

Design and Development of a Hand Exoskeleton Robot for Active and Passive Rehabilitation

This paper proposes a cable-driven parallel waist rehabilitation robot with two-level control algorithm to assist the patients with waist injuries to do some rehabilitation training. The uniqueness of the robot is that it can accurately implement the relative lateral bending, flexion, extension, and rotation of the waist on the premise of the safety. This is enabled by a mechanism design according to the motion characteristics of the human waist, and it can satisfy the need of different waist injury patients. The kinematics and dynamics of the robot are analyzed. In addition, a two-level controller is introduced to improve the accuracy of the rehabilitation training trajectory on the premise of the safety of patients and reduce the system calculation. The proportion-integration-differentiation (PID) algorithm is adopted to realize the position control in the low-level controller to ensure the accuracy of the robot. In the high-level controller, the fuzzy algorithm is used to adjust the parameters of the low-level controller according to the tension variation of cables, which ensures the patient safety and the stable operation of the robot. Finally, a prototype waist rehabilitation robot is developed for experimental calibration and performance testing. Results indicate that the designed robot system can achieve the waist rehabilitation training and the control algorithm can improve the system performance under the external disturbance.

Design and Development of a New Cable-Driven Parallel Robot for Waist Rehabilitation

Evolutionary synthesis of mechanisms applied to the design of an exoskeleton for finger rehabilitation

Design and development of a hand exoskeleton for rehabilitation of hand injuries

The invention discloses a human-computer interaction control system, embedded in an Android mobile terminal and FPGA, of a hand function rehabilitation robot and relates to the technical field of human-computer interaction control of robots. The human-computer interaction control system, embedded in the Android mobile terminal and FPGA, of the hand function rehabilitation robot solves the problems that an existing hand function rehabilitation robot system is poor in human-computer interaction capacity, poor in openness and not portable. According to the human-computer interaction control system, embedded in the Android mobile terminal and FPGA, of the hand function rehabilitation robot, a data acquisition module receives information of pressure, applied to finger tips of exoskeleton mechanical arms from human finger tips, acquired by a pressure sensor and rotating angle information, acquired by an angle sensor, of the exoskeleton mechanical arms, the data acquisition module then processes the information and transmits the information to an FPGA single-chip system for data processing to obtain data information and then transmits the data information to the Android mobile terminal in a wireless mode for simulation, and the data information is converted into data files by the Android mobile terminal and then is sent to a PC through the Internet. The human-computer interaction control system, embedded in the Android mobile terminal and FPGA, of the hand function rehabilitation robot is suitable for hand rehabilitation training.

Human-computer interaction control system, embedded in Android mobile terminal and FPGA, of hand function rehabilitation robot

Exoskeleton-type hand function rehabilitation robot

The free-floating space manipulator (FFSM) system is the one in which the spacecraft's attitude is not actively controlled during manipulator activity to conserve fuel of the spacecraft. In this case, the spacecraft will move freely in response to the disturbances caused by the manipulator motions. From the viewpoint of the application, the spacecraft attitude change of the FFSM system is not desirable. A point-to-point planning approach of the FFSM is presented to ensure that the manipulator end-effector reaches the desired point and the spacecraft attitude is zero-disturbance simultaneously, only by manipulator motion planning. With the introduction of the correlative coefficient, whether the singularities of the current path points happen could be judged. If it doesn't happen, the zero-disturbance vector synthesis algorithm in Cartesian space is utilized to find the next point; otherwise, the comparison planning algorithm in joint space is employed to find the next point. Thus, the approach satisfies the requirement of the former algorithm to the non-singularity of the path point, and to some degree overcomes the limitation of only using the latter algorithm. Hence, the path planning approach could be realized in entire workspace of the FFSM with zero-disturbance spacecraft attitude. The effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed approach is verified by simulation results.

Chen Hongwei

Papers

Design and development of a hand exoskeleton for rehabilitation of hand injuries

Human-computer interaction control system, embedded in Android mobile terminal and FPGA, of hand function rehabilitation robot

Exoskeleton-type hand function rehabilitation robot

Point-to-point planning for free-floating space manipulator with zero-disturbance spacecraft attitude

Back type exoskeleton finger joint circuitous mechanism