Research on SMA actuated tendon driven hand exoskeleton with bidirectional finger joint motion coupling for rehabilitation usage

Most modern exoskeleton devices for hand rehabilitation are bulgy and heavy for portable usage; some of them are even non-movable. To facilitate the therapy processes into patients' daily lives, a tendon driven hand exoskeleton device which was actuated by shape memory alloy(SMA) spring series was developed for hand motor function rehabilitation in this paper. Issues such as system configuration, finger joint motion coupling plan, mechanical design of exoskeleton parts and experimental setup, and SMA actuators arrangements are introduced and discussed. A virtual reality interface was also developed, which provides an interactive control panel for in hospital usage. Motion and force test were also carried out during the evaluation experiments, and the results was also discussed.