Abstract
Studies have developed various types of soft robotic gloves for hand rehabilitation in recent years. Most soft actuators achieved a sufficient thumb flexion assist while lacking opposition support, which requires the coordination of thumb flexion and abduction-adduction. The difficulties for thumb support lie in the intrinsic complexity of thumb movements and spatial restriction of the hand. To realize multiple degrees of freedom of the thumb and make effective use of the limited space of the hand's dorsal side, we optimized and compared two approaches for thumb support. The combination approach used two independent soft actuators for thumb flexion and abduction-adduction support, respectively. The all-in-one approach used one single soft actuator to assist motions in different directions. We designed the soft actuators for each approach based on the thumb's biomechanical characteristics and evaluated their thumb flexion, abduction support performance in terms of the range of motion (RoM) and force output, and the opposition support performance using an enhanced Kapandji test. The results showed a larger abduction RoM and force output of the composition approach and a higher Kapandji score of the all-in-one approach, indicating that the two approaches might be applicable for thumb support but have the advantage in different rehabilitation stages.
Highlights
IntroductionOVER 80 million people currently live have experienced a stroke, and the number is increasing rapidly [1]
Multi-chamber structured soft actuators have been well studied as surgery devices, which are required to have high flexibility, with less requirement of force output. 3-chamber actuator (3C-ACT) in this study aimed to be multi-DoFs and have a considerable force output, taking into consideration of the biomechanical characteristics of thumb
Design concepts of the fan-shaped actuator (fan-ACT): Intrinsic muscles responsible for thumb abduction and opposition are mainly located between the 1st and the 2nd metacarpals (Fig. 1 (A))
Summary
OVER 80 million people currently live have experienced a stroke, and the number is increasing rapidly [1]. Hand recovery after stroke might be a challenging and lengthy process due to the complexity of finger movements. Due to the labor shortage in rehabilitation therapists, it becomes necessary to use an assistive device to achieve the required high repetition for hand rehabilitation. Researchers have developed various hand rehabilitation gloves driven by either rigid systems or soft pneumatic actuators. The rigid systems [2], [3], [4] depend on servomotors or Manuscript received: April 13, 2021; Revised: July 9, 2021; Accepted: July 24, 2021.This paper was recommended for publication by Editor Kyu-Jin Cho upon evaluation of the Associate Editor and Reviewers’ comments.
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