Recycled Polymer Orthoses for Post-Stroke Neurorehabilitation in Kazakhstan: Development and Biomechanical Evaluation of Low-Cost 3D-Printed Orthoses

This paper presents a narrative review and conceptual engineering design study on low-cost, 3D-printed hand orthoses for post-stroke neurorehabilitation in Kazakhstan, fabricated from recycled polyethylene terephthalate (rPET). The work reviews international literature on 3D-printed and tendon-driven soft wearable devices for stroke rehabilitation and proposes a patient-specific orthosis design intended to integrate with rehabilitation-robotics platforms already developed in Kazakhstan. The design is grounded in published mechanical data for rPET-based FDM parts and compared against PLA and TPU as candidate materials. This is a design-stage conceptual study: it does not report original tensile, fatigue, finite-element, or clinical data, and is intended as a first step toward a mechanically validated and clinically tested device.