Abstract
Abstract. The increasing number of patients with hand disabilities after strokes or peripheral nerve injuries necessitates the continuous development of rehabilitation system devices to accelerate muscle recovery and to help patients regain the motor functions of their hands. This paper introduces the design of a hand rehabilitation system for patients who have a solitary impairment of their hand extension. The system was designed to be portable, simple, and cheap. Using a system based on a cable-driven mechanism instead of traditional rigid links reduces the degrees of freedom of the finger to one. The dielectric elastomer actuator was designed and fabricated as a smart actuator for the system, which supports the low cost of the system. A kinematic analysis of the cable-driven mechanism has been done. Parameters of the actuator were optimized to reach the required output. In order to characterize the performance of the actuator, a uniaxial tension test, isotonic test, and isometric test have been implemented.
Highlights
The hand is a vital, multifunctional organ for humans that plays an important role in physical activities and in the development of fine and gross motor skills
The proposed hand rehabilitation mechanism is physically connected to the natural hand exoskeleton, so it has a direct correspondence with the human joints and limbs
Using the cable-driven system instead of rigid links decreases the number of degree of freedom (DOF) from three to one as the linear motion of the cable wire moves the three revolute joints of the finger instantly
Summary
The hand is a vital, multifunctional organ for humans that plays an important role in physical activities and in the development of fine and gross motor skills. The need to develop hand rehabilitation strategies became a vital issue with an increase in the number of patients (and old people in particular) who suffer from impairments in their hand motor function after strokes and injuries. Human-assisted therapy is challenging and expensive, many hand rehabilitation devices or robotassisted therapies were recently introduced and achieved excellent results by enhancing the motor function of the muscles. Those devices offer a new kind of physiotherapy; in this way, patients practice moving their muscles by following or withstanding the robot’s force. There have been significant developments with the advances in robotic technology, such as the exoskeleton and bioengineering, that have become a significant addition to physiotherapy methods
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