Abstract
Rehabilitation of hand functions is necessary to improve post-stroke patients' quality of life. There is initial evidence that hand exoskeletons should exercise flexion/extension (f/e) and abduction/adduction (a/a) of the fingers to rebuild hand functions. However, designing a self-alignment mechanism of the metacarpophalangeal (MCP) joint to improve its wearing comfort is still a challenge. In this paper, a novel index finger exoskeleton with three motors is proposed to help post-stroke patients perform finger a/a and f/e training. A spatial mechanism with passive degrees of freedom for the MCP joint is designed to realize human-robot axes self-alignment. The proposed mechanism's kinematic compatibility is analyzed to show its self-aligning capability, and the kineto-statics analysis is performed to present the exoskeleton's static characteristics. Finally, kinematic and static experiments have been conducted, and the results indicate that the standardized reaction forces square sum of the exoskeleton to the MCP joint can be reduced by 65.8% compared with the state-of-the-art exoskeleton. According to the experimental results, the exoskeleton can achieve the a/a and f/e training and human-robot axes self-alignment, and improve its comfortability. In the future, clinical trials will be further studied to test the exoskeleton.
Highlights
L ARGE numbers of people suffer from physical disorders due to stroke, such as hand dysfunction [1]
The kineto-statics analysis results indicate that there is the shear force in the design proposed by Cempini et al and it increases with the increase of the flexion angle
Compared with the mechanism configuration in [8], the standardized reaction forces square sum (SRFSS) is reduced by 65.8%
Summary
L ARGE numbers of people suffer from physical disorders due to stroke, such as hand dysfunction [1]. The loss of hand motor function reduces patients’ self-care ability, leading to affect their quality of life [2]. It is crucial to Manuscript received December 28, 2020; revised April 14, 2021 and June 3, 2021; accepted June 28, 2021. Date of publication July 16, 2021; date of current version August 3, 2021. (Ning Sun and Guotao Li contributed to this work.) (Corresponding author: Long Cheng.). This work involved human subjects or animals in its research.
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