Soft Robotic Bilateral Rehabilitation System for Hand and Wrist Joints

Abstract

Upper limb functionality is essential to perform activities of daily living. It is critical to investigate neurorehabilitation therapies in order to improve upper limb functionality in post-stroke patients. This paper presents a soft-robotic bilateral system to provide rehabilitation therapy for hand and wrist joints. A sensorized glove that tracks finger and wrist joint movements is worn on the healthy limb, which guides the movement of the paretic limb. The input of sensors from the healthy limb is provided to the soft robotic exoskeleton attached to the paretic limb to mimic the motion. A proportional derivative flow-based control algorithm is used to perform bilateral therapy. To test the feasibility of the developed system, two different applications are performed experimentally: (1) Wrist exercise with a dumbbell, and (2) Object pick-and-place task. The initial tests of the developed system verified its capability to perform bilateral therapy.

The Design of Decoupled Robotic Arm Based on Chain Transmission

“…In recent years, flexible robotic arms have been widely used in medical treatment, picked due to their soft texture, high adaptability, and stability [24,25], which also provides a new direction for our next research ideas. In the future, we will consider combining a robotic arm with a flexible gripper (as shown in Figure 28) to complete product grabbing with one degree of freedom.…”