Assistive Robotic Hand Orthosis (ARHO) controlled with EMG: evaluation of a preliminary prototype

Abstract

— Hand impairment severely limits basic activities of daily living (ADL). The use of motorized hand orthoses may provide enough functional assistance to perform basic tasks, such as grasping objects. Several prototypes have been proposed in the last decade, but there are still no solutions with the desired features regarding the weight, wearability and functionality. This paper describes the overall implementation of a prototype of an assistive robotic hand orthosis (ARHO) for object grasping, that can be triggered manually or by the detection of muscular activity in the forearm using surface electromyography (sEMG). The system is being specifically designed for a person with hemiplegia resulting from a hemispherectomy. The proposed orthosis is a very preliminary but functional prototype, still far from the desired features mentioned above, but serves to show all the modules composing a low-cost implementation, and most of all to understand all the constraints and difficulties in designing such a system.

Intention Detection Strategies for Robotic Upper-Limb Orthoses: A Scoping Review Considering Usability, Daily Life Application, and User Evaluation

“…Three studies did not provide unambiguous information about the used control method (Pedrocchi et al, 2013 ; Mohammadi et al, 2018 ; Rose and O'Malley, 2019 ). A total of 15 studies used pattern recognition-EMG techniques to control hand orthoses (Ngeo et al, 2013 ; Kawase et al, 2017 ; Meeker et al, 2017 ; Siu et al, 2018 ; Burns et al, 2019 ; Dwivedi et al, 2019 ; Farinha et al, 2019 ; Lu et al, 2019 ; Park et al, 2019 , 2020 ; Secciani et al, 2019 ; Zhang et al, 2019 ), and wrist, elbow, or shoulder orthoses (Kiguchi, 2007 ; Kawase et al, 2017 ; Kilic, 2017 ; Lotti et al, 2020 ). To do so, up to 12 EMG channels were used (Kiguchi, 2007 ), controlling up to a maximum of six different states (Dwivedi et al, 2019 ; Lu et al, 2019 ; Zhang et al, 2019 ).…”

“…In 21 studies, conventional manual triggers such as buttons/switches (Ochoa et al, 2009 ; Pedrocchi et al, 2013 ; Ambrosini et al, 2014a ; Yap et al, 2016 , 2017a ; Meeker et al, 2017 ; Fardipour et al, 2018 ; Otten et al, 2018 ; Butzer et al, 2019 , 2021 ; Farinha et al, 2019 ; Correia et al, 2020 ; Gerez et al, 2020 ; Muehlbauer et al, 2021 ), joysticks (Hasegawa and Oura, 2011 ; Dalla Gasperina et al, 2019 ; Ismail et al, 2019 ; Tiseni et al, 2019 ), or touchscreens (Yap et al, 2017b ; Mohammadi et al, 2018 ; Sandison et al, 2020 ) have been used.…”