Design and development of a skinny bidirectional soft glove for post-stroke hand rehabilitation

Numerous endeavors have been dedicated in creating automated post-stroke hand rehabilitation and assistive devices over the last decade. An extensive variety of actuators have been investigated in directing the patients' finger to maneuver in a natural path. Despite the fact that their execution is considered satisfactory for some typical undertakings, there is ample room for improvement by applying late advances in lightweight, soft and flexible bending actuator. This paper presents an innovative design of a skinny rehabilitation glove by using a bi-directional soft pneumatic bending actuator. It describes the prototyping of a complete hand rehabilitation system, including the design of glove, control kit and user interface. Some preparatory test results demonstrate good repeatability and controllability of the prototype. Attributed to its light weight, low profile, anthropomorphic form, satisfactory output force and angular displacement in both contraction and extension, it shows a pragmatic solution to an automatic robot-aided post-stroke hand rehabilitation system.