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Development of a hand exoskeleton system for index finger rehabilitation

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Abstract

In order to overcome the drawbacks of traditional rehabilitation method, the robot-aided rehabilitation has been widely investigated for the recent years. And the hand rehabilitation robot, as one of the hot research fields, remains many challenging issues to be investigated. This paper presents a new hand exoskeleton system with some novel characteristics. Firstly, both active and passive rehabilitative motions are realized. Secondly, the device is elaborately designed and brings advantages in many aspects. For example, joint motion is accomplished by a parallelogram mechanism and high level motion control is therefore made very simple without the need of complicated kinematics. The adjustable joint limit design ensures that the actual joint angles don’t exceed the joint range of motion (ROM) and thus the patient safety is guaranteed. This design can fit to the different patients with different joint ROM as well as to the dynamically changing ROM for individual patient. The device can also accommodate to some extent variety of hand sizes. Thirdly, the proposed control strategy simultaneously realizes the position control and force control with the motor driver which only works in force control mode. Meanwhile, the system resistance compensation is preliminary realized and the resisting force is effectively reduced. Some experiments were conducted to verify the proposed system. Experimentally collected data show that the achieved ROM is close to that of a healthy hand and the range of phalange length (ROPL) covers the size of a typical hand, satisfying the size need of regular hand rehabilitation. In order to evaluate the performance when it works as a haptic device in active mode, the equivalent moment of inertia (MOI) of the device was calculated. The results prove that the device has low inertia which is critical in order to obtain good backdrivability. The experiments also show that in the active mode the virtual interactive force is successfully feedback to the finger and the resistance is reduced by one-third; for the passive control mode, the desired trajectory is realized satisfactorily.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Virtual Reality Technology and Systems, Beihang University, Beijing, 100191, China

    Jiting Li, Shuang Wang, Ju Wang, Ruoyin Zheng, Yuru Zhang & Zhongyuan Chen

Authors
  1. Jiting Li
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  2. Shuang Wang
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  3. Ju Wang
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  4. Ruoyin Zheng
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  5. Yuru Zhang
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  6. Zhongyuan Chen
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jiting Li.

Additional information

This project is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 50975009)

LI Jiting, born in 1967, is currently an associate professor at State Key Laboratory of Virtual Reality Technology and Systems, Robotics Institute, Beihang University, China. Her research interests include robot kinematics and dynamics, haptic interfaces, and virtual rehabilitation.

WANG Shuang, born in 1985, is currently a master candidate at State Key Laboratory of Virtual Reality Technology and Systems, Robotics Institute, Beihang University, China.

WANG Ju, born in 1985, is currently a master candidate at State Key Laboratory of Virtual Reality Technology and Systems, Robotics Institute, Beihang University, China.

ZHENG Ruoyin, born in 1986, is currently a master candidate at State Key Laboratory of Virtual Reality Technology and Systems, Robotics Institute, Beihang University, China.

ZHANG Yuru, born in 1959, is currently a professor at State Key Laboratory of Virtual Reality Technology and Systems, Robotics Institute, Beihang University, China. Her research is focused on the design of new mechanisms for a variety of applications including robotics, haptic interface, rehabilitation, tele-operation and virtual prototyping.

CHEN Zhongyuan, born in 1987, is currently a master candidate at State Key Laboratory of Virtual Reality Technology and Systems, Robotics Institute, Beihang University, China.

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Li, J., Wang, S., Wang, J. et al. Development of a hand exoskeleton system for index finger rehabilitation. Chin. J. Mech. Eng. 25, 223–233 (2012). https://doi.org/10.3901/CJME.2012.02.223

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.3901/CJME.2012.02.223

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