Development of Smart Glove system for therapy treatment

Arm rehabilitation activities require continuous monitoring process in order to provide information on rehabilitation results to be analyzed by therapist. The purpose of monitoring is to help them to improve and customize the rehabilitation process. Moreover, a portable and simple home-based rehabilitation device can help patients to improve daily rehabilitation activity. Some previous studies regarding home-based rehabilitation process have shown improvement promoting human movement recovery. But existing rehabilitation devices are expensive and need to be supervised by a physical therapist, which are complicated to be used at home. Some devices are not so efficient to be used at home due to the large size and complex system. In this current work, flex sensor, force sensitive resistors and accelerometer were assessed in order to be implemented as a sensory unit for a portable arm rehabilitation device. The analog signal from the sensors will be conveyed to an Arduino microcontroller for data processing and logging. The device is equipped with online or portable data logging capabilities which can store daily activity results. The results of rehabilitation activity can be used for further monitoring and analysis. Experiments were carried out to determine the feasibility of each sensor towards the design of the new device (Figure 1). The experiments demonstrate the capabilities of the sensors to produce extended information regarding arm movement activities which can be implemented in the design.