Abstract
Disabilities are a global issue due to the decrease in life quality and mobility of patients, especially people suffering from hand disabilities. This paper presents a review of active hand exoskeleton technologies, over the past decade, for rehabilitation, assistance, augmentation, and haptic devices. Hand exoskeletons are still an active research field due to challenges that engineers face and are trying to solve. Each hand exoskeleton has certain requirements to fulfil to achieve their aims. These requirements have been extracted and categorized into two sections: general and specific, to give a common platform for developing future devices. Since this is still a developing area, the requirements are also shaped according to the advances in the field. Technical challenges, such as size requirements, weight, ergonomics, rehabilitation, actuators, and sensors are all due to the complex anatomy and biomechanics of the hand. The hand is one of the most complex structures in the human body; therefore, to understand certain design approaches, the anatomy and biomechanics of the hand are addressed in this paper. The control of these devices is also an arising challenge due to the implementation of intelligent systems and new rehabilitation techniques. This includes intention detection techniques (electroencephalography (EEG), electromyography (EMG), admittance) and estimating applied assistance. Therefore, this paper summarizes the technology in a systematic approach and reviews the state of the art of active hand exoskeletons with a focus on rehabilitation and assistive devices.
Highlights
The idea of developing robots that can be attached to humans to assist in certain tasks is not new
The technology of exoskeletons was first developed for military purposes, but the interest in the medical and rehabilitation areas soon sparked, which led to numerous attempts to solve one problem: the problem of rehabilitating and assisting individuals with disabilities to improve their quality of life, especially hand impairments
Passive devices were handled the same way as augmentation and haptic devices, where only some were considered for additional information and the majority were excluded because this study focused on the technology of active rehabilitation and assistive devices
Summary
The idea of developing robots that can be attached to humans to assist in certain tasks is not new. The technology of exoskeletons was first developed for military purposes, but the interest in the medical and rehabilitation areas soon sparked, which led to numerous attempts to solve one problem: the problem of rehabilitating and assisting individuals with disabilities to improve their quality of life, especially hand impairments. Strokes and spinal cord injuries (SCI), as mentioned above, are some of the main causes of hand disabilities due to hemiplegia [8] These injuries and diseases can affect one’s life greatly; engineers have been designing robotics to work in tandem with humans to assist with these issues and improve their quality of life.
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