Design and development of the wearable hand exoskeleton system for rehabilitation of hand impaired patients

In the past decade, the population of disability grew rapidly and became one of main problems in our society. The significant amounts of impaired patients include not only lower limb but also upper limb impairment such as the motor function of arm and hand. However, physical therapy requires high personal expenses and takes long time to complete the rehabilitation. In order to solve the problem mentioned above, a wearable hand exoskeleton system was developed in this paper. The hand exoskeleton system typically designed to accomplish the requirements for rehabilitation. Figure 1 shows the prototype of hand exoskeleton system which can be easily worn on human hand. The developed exoskeleton finger can provide bi-directional movements in bending and extension motion for all joints of the finger through cable transmission. The kinematic relations between the fingertip and metacarpal was derived and verified. Moreover, the construction of control system is presented in this paper. The preliminary experiment results for finger´s position control have demonstrated that the proposed device is capable of accommodating to the aforementioned variables.