3D Scanning Smart Glove for Shape and Softness of a Patient's Body in Orthopedic Applications

The sendance-glove measuring system metaphorically turns the hands of healthcare professionals into a 3D scanner for the shape and softness of a patient's body.It is a scanning glove with combined pressure and position sensors embedded in a silicone matrix, which makes it possible to transform tactile information into digital data directly usable for designing mobility aids and orthopedic devices, such as ankle-foot orthoses and custom orthopedic shoes.To the best of our knowledge, capturing the implicit knowledge embedded in an expert's fingertips via a scanning glove is a completely new approach to digitize healthcare.The sendance-glove system allows designing orthopedic devices without artisan processes like plaster casting or tape measuring.The position sensors, which work with a measurement principle based on electromagnetic induction, identify the fingertips' positions with <1 mm precision.The pressure sensors developed by sendance GmbH are small (6mm diameter, 0.3 mm thickness), built from a flex-PCB and a thin film of piezoresistive material.Integrated in the glove, they are calibrated over a pressure range of 10 -250 kPa to achieve high precision and repeatability.The core functionality of the glove scanning system is realized when data from the pressure and position sensors are correlated.With data pairs of both pressure and position captured at the same time, functionalities such as shape surface detection, distance measurement and tissue hardness estimation can be achieved.