Design of a wearable hand rehabilitation system for quantitative evaluation of the stroke hand

In this paper, the design of a hand rehabilitation system is introduced for evaluating the hand function and performing the hand rehabilitation. In an attempt to evaluate the hand function such as a finger stiffness, a finger independency, a multi-finger synergy quantitatively, the finger joint angles and the external force to the finger should be measured via the device. In addition, the device assists voluntary/involuntary movement of the hand flexion/extension motion for hand rehabilitation and the device can apply the force to each finger. In order to find the additional requirements, an expert's group interview was performed. According to the interview, several requirements for designing the rehabilitation system were found and these are categorized as four parts (wearability, durability, soft contacting with skin and stability). Based on the above requirements, several structure design candidates are introduced and analyzed for each candidate's merits and demerits with numerical simulation. Total system configuration using the final design and future works are introduced in the last part of this paper.