Design of an adaptive tendon-driven hand exoskeleton for stroke rehabilitation

With an aging world population and an increasing incidence of strokes, accessible hand rehabilitation is becoming more and more urgent. Physiotherapists struggle to distribute their time between patients. Existing exoskeletons for rehabilitation are limited by cost, weight, and complexity, driven by the need for multiple motors and rigid structures to actuate the full hand mobility. To address this challenge, we propose a new lightweight soft exoskeleton with a single motor; a differential gearbox distributes its output across the whole hand according to the individual finger resistance to motion. A preliminary prototype is manufactured and experimentally tested to demonstrate the concept, achieving a low cost (C400) functional system weighing only 282g (motor) and 17g (glove).