Soft Robotic Bilateral Hand Rehabilitation System for Fine Motor Learning

This paper presents the development of a pneumatically actuated soft robotic based bilateral therapy system for hand rehabilitation in post-stroke patients. The goal is to use a healthy hand to guide the motion of the paretic hand using a sensorized glove and a robotic exoskeleton, respectively. The sensorized glove tracks the motion of the healthy hand and provides inputs for the soft robotic hand exoskeleton to apply mimicking motion to the paretic hand. Two control algorithms, PD flow-based and adaptive PD pressure-based position controls, were developed and tested. Initial tests confirmed the ability of the systems to apply bilateral therapy. Furthermore, the adaptive pressure-based controller showed better performance with overall error reduced by 25.8% with respect to the flow-based controller. Future studies will include feasibility and performance of the system for applying therapy to post-stroke patients.