Hand rehabilitation support system based on self-motion-control

This paper presents a hand rehabilitation support system for self-performing rehabilitation therapies. The developed system consists of hand exoskeleton device, which provides individual finger joint motion for disabled persons, and a lateral symmetric master-slave motion assistant system joined with virtual reality (VR) environment. Most of disability caused by CVA (Cerebral VascularAccident) or bone fracture are hemiplegia where impaired hand is only in one side. Based on the peculiarity of this disability, we adopted a symmetric master-slave motion assistant system in which the impaired hand is driven by the healthy hand in the opposite side.