Functional assessment of hand orthopedic disorders using a sensorised glove: preliminary results

The aim of this paper was to analyse the feasibility of using a sensor-based glove as a tool for the assessment of hand function in persons with orthopedic disorders such as rhizoarthrosis. A glove embedding 20 Hall-effect sensors was used for this purpose. Its performance in terms of repeatability were preliminary investigated in order to define an effective strategy for the use of the glove in these applications. After this preliminary phase, focused clinical experiments were carried out in order to verify the existence of differences usable for performance assessment in the postures of the hand of able-bodied and subjects affected by rhizoarthrosis during grasping. The data were processed by using the principal component analysis (PCA) technique. The preliminary results of these experiments showed that the use of the first and second principal components can allow to discriminate between able-bodied and disabled persons and also between disabled persons before and after the surgical intervention. For this reason, this approach could represent an effective tool for the surgeon during the rehabilitation process in this particular situation. Further experiments will be carried out in the future in order to confirm these preliminary results. Moreover, a new calibration procedure of the sensor-based glove will be developed in order to improve the performance of the glove.