Rehabilitation Glove With Soft Inflatable Actuators for Precision Grasping: Design, Fabrication, Modeling and Preliminary Evaluation

The hand is essential to a human’s daily activities. To rehabilitate patients with hand function disorders, the first step is the extension and flexion of fingers and then regaining the ability to pinch objects. A device suitable for pinch grasping rehabilitation has to be lightweight, small relative to a hand, work in a safe air pressure range, and produce enough range of motion and force. In this paper, a glove with the mentioned characteristics is designed, fabricated, and evaluated. The actuators used in the glove have undergone force and range of motion tests that show promising outputs, such as 3N of force at the tip of the finger, that is enough to pick a 240g object and sufficient range of motion for each joint to perform the box and block test. A model has been developed to be used in designing the device in accordance with the patient’s needs. This model can also be used to identify the stiffness of each knuckle to conduct better rehabilitation methods. The model was verified by being applied to a dummy finger. Furthermore, an actuation pack was developed and evaluated to enable device portability in everyday use conditions.