Abstract
Robotic devices are being employed in more and more sectors to enhance, streamline, and augment the outcomes of a wide variety of human activities. Wearable robots arise indeed as of-vital-importance tools for telerehabilitation or home assistance targeting people affected by motor disabilities. In particular, the field of “Robotics for Medicine and Healthcare” is attracting growing interest. The development of such devices is a primarily addressed topic since the increasing number of people in need of rehabilitation or assistive therapies (due to population aging) growingly weighs on the healthcare systems of the nation. Besides, the necessity to move to clinics represents an additional logistic burden for patients and their families. Among the various body parts, the hand is specially investigated since it most ensures the independence of an individual, and thus, the restoration of its dexterity is considered a high priority. In this study, the authors present the development of a fully wearable, portable, and tailor-made hand exoskeleton designed for both home assistance and telerehabilitation. Its purpose is either to assist patients during activities of daily living by running a real-time intention detection algorithm or to be used for remotely supervised or unsupervised rehabilitation sessions by performing exercises preset by therapists. Throughout the mechatronic design process, special attention has been paid to the complete wearability and comfort of the system to produce a user-friendly device capable of assisting people in their daily life or enabling recorded home rehabilitation sessions allowing the therapist to monitor the state evolution of the patient. Such a hand exoskeleton system has been designed, manufactured, and preliminarily tested on a subject affected by spinal muscular atrophy, and some results are reported at the end of the article.
Highlights
The demographic, economic, social, technological, environmental, and political factors (DESTEP factors) of the last decades of the twentieth century and the first years of the twenty-first century have paved the way to the advent of Robotics for Medicine and Healthcare (Butter et al, 2008)
The tested exoskeleton is tailormade for a patient’s hand, who has followed this research from the beginning
The subject is affected by Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA) type II since birth
Summary
The demographic, economic, social, technological, environmental, and political factors (DESTEP factors) of the last decades of the twentieth century and the first years of the twenty-first century have paved the way to the advent of Robotics for Medicine and Healthcare (Butter et al, 2008). Exoskeletons differ in the employed method and sensors for finger pose tracking during operation, e.g., optical, flex, magnetic sensors, or finger exerted forces measuring Such devices might be passive or active, and they might be distinguished in the way of detecting the user intentions near correctly as possible, e.g., using surface ElectroMyoGraphic (sEMG) signals (Ho et al, 2011; Meng et al, 2017; Yun et al, 2017; Rose and O’alley, 2018; Wang et al, 2018; Bouteraa et al, 2019; Dittli et al, 2020; Yurkewich et al, 2020). It is essential to point out that no performance improvements have been implemented from the last version, but instead, they remain similar, mainly because of exploiting the same actuator and kinematic structure For these reasons, the main contribution of the work reported in this study relies on the innovative mechatronic design that results in a fully wearable and portable robotic device for assisting impaired hands.
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