Development of Wearable Robotic System for Finger Movement Assistance

This paper proposes a wearable robotic system to support a subject moving his fingers actively or passively in high electromagnetic field. We design a hand exoskeleton with 8 active degrees of freedom for finger tapping movement, which consists of four exoskeletal fingers excluding a thumb. In order to be compatible with MRI environment, the robot is fabricated with nonmagnetic materials through 3D printing and pneumatic actuators are applied to generate joint torques of the exoskeleton for finger movements. Potentiometers are mounted on the MP and PIP joints of four fingers to measure angles and angular velocity of joints. Some measurement experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the exoskeleton, including flexion range, time delay, working pressure and tapping frequency. Finally, we confirmed the compatibility of the exoskeleton in MRI environment through measurement experiments of a subject's brain activity. In the future, we will design an experiment to study a specified reorganization area of human brain to help researchers to understand how the motor function is regenerated from point of neuroscience.