Design of an Inertial-Sensor-Based Data Glove for Hand Function Evaluation.

Bor-Shing Lin,Yi-Chiang Lo,Jean-Lon Chen,I-Jung Lee,Shu-Yu Yang,Junghsi Lee

doi:10.3390/s18051545

Abstract

Capturing hand motions for hand function evaluations is essential in the medical field. Various data gloves have been developed for rehabilitation and manual dexterity assessments. This study proposed a modular data glove with 9-axis inertial measurement units (IMUs) to obtain static and dynamic parameters during hand function evaluation. A sensor fusion algorithm is used to calculate the range of motion of joints. The data glove is designed to have low cost, easy wearability, and high reliability. Owing to the modular design, the IMU board is independent and extensible and can be used with various microcontrollers to realize more medical applications. This design greatly enhances the stability and maintainability of the glove.

Highlights

Capturing hand kinematics is necessary in medical applications, such as rehabilitation and hand function evaluation [1,2,3]
The results show that the raw data outputted from the inertial measurement units (IMUs) of our proposed system are accurate and have high level of confidence
The results showed that the Root mean square error (RMSE) were all less than 1◦ at any static angle, indicating that the range of motion (ROM) calculated by the sensor fusion algorithm has high accuracy in the static state

Summary

Introduction

Capturing hand kinematics is necessary in medical applications, such as rehabilitation and hand function evaluation [1,2,3]. Studies on hand kinematics capturing have used noncontact-based or wearable technology [2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13]. Noncontact-based approaches mainly use cameras or depth-based cameras to capture hand kinematics and analyze continuous hand movements through image processing [4,6,7]. Self-occlusion when the hand is in a non-observed condition causes the inaccurate kinematics capturing. Wearable systems are more practical for capturing the hand kinematics precisely without environmental restrictions

Objectives

Methods

Discussion

Conclusion