Flexible Sensors for Hand Rehabilitation Training System

Abstract

In recent years, the number of patients with impaired hand function caused by stroke and other diseases has increased gradually. Proper rehabilitation training can improve hand disability recover performance effectively, which is of great significance to patients’ daily life. In view of the shortage of domestic medical resources, insufficient attention to rehabilitation training and high cost, we developed an active rehabilitation training system based on data gloves by combining flexible sensors with a glove. The data glove consists of flexible pressure sensor array, stretchable bending sensors, an inertial sensor, and data acquisition circuit. The sensors are used to measure pressure values applied to fingers and palm, bending angle of each finger, and motion status of hand respectively. For this project, virtual reality technology was adopted for rehabilitation treatment, and we developed interactive games for hand rehabilitation training based on Unity3D platform. The platform receives and processes sensor data, use the data to generate interactive gaming environment, so that patients can perform rehabilitation training by playing games in the virtual world without leaving home. The platform can save historical training data to database, so that patients and doctors can evaluate the effectiveness of rehabilitation training performance any time, and make adjustment to training strategy timely.