In traditional hand function assessment, patients and physicians always need to accomplish complex activities and rating tasks. This paper proposes a novel wearable glove system for hand function assessment. A sensing system consisting of 12 nine-axis inertial and magnetic unit (IMMU) sensors is used to obtain the acceleration, angular velocity, and geomagnetic orientation of human hand movements. A complementary filter algorithm is applied to calculate the angles of joints after sensor calibration. A virtual hand model is also developed to map with the glove system in the Unity platform. The experimental results show that this glove system can capture and reproduce human hand motions with high accuracy. This smart glove system is expected to reduce the complexity and time consumption of hand kinematics assessment.

This paper presents a novel reconfigurable crawling robot based on an origami twisted tower structure. Compared with other origami structures, the twisted tower can achieve extension, contraction, and bending motions as the flexible body parts in robotic designs. The kinematics of a one-layer twisted tower were analyzed with rotation and bending angles. The mechanical properties of the one-layer, two-layer, and four-layer twisted towers were compared with compression experiments. A rope-motor-driven crawling robot was designed to realize forward, backward, left-turning, and right-turning motions. Two types of crawling robot with specific sliding feet were developed to adapt to different ground conditions: one made of rubber, and the other embedded with an electromagnet. The experimental results show that the proposed robots can move at an average forward speed of 0.48 cm/s on a wooden desk, and at 0.52 cm/s forward speed or 0.65 cm/s backward speed on an iron platform.