Design and control of an actuated thumb exoskeleton for hand rehabilitation following stroke

Author

Wang, Furui ; Shastri, Milind ; Jones, Christopher L. ; Gupta, Vikash ; Osswald, Christian ; Kang, Xuan ; Kamper, Derek G. ; Sarkar, Nilanjan

Author_Institution

Dept. of Mech. Eng., Vanderbilt Univ., Nashville, TN, USA

fYear

2011

fDate

9-13 May 2011

Firstpage

3688

Lastpage

3693

Abstract

Chronic hand impairment is common following stroke. This paper presents an actuated thumb exoskeleton (ATX) to facilitate research in hand rehabilitation therapy. The ATX presented in this work permits independent bi-directional actuation in each of the 5 degrees-of-freedom (DOF) of the thumb using a mechanism that has 5 active DOF and 3 passive DOF. The ATX is able to provide considerable joint torques for the user while still allowing backdrivability through flexible shaft transmission. A prototype has been built and experiments were conducted to evaluate the closed-loop position control. Further improvement and future work are discussed.

Keywords

closed loop systems; manipulators; medical robotics; patient rehabilitation; patient treatment; position control; ATX; actuated thumb exoskeleton; chronic hand impairment; closed-loop position control; flexible shaft transmission; hand rehabilitation therapy; joint torques; Exoskeletons; Force; Joints; Shafts; Target tracking; Thumb; Torque;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2011 IEEE International Conference on

Conference_Location

Shanghai

ISSN

1050-4729

Print_ISBN

978-1-61284-386-5

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICRA.2011.5980099

Filename

5980099