Characterization of a hand-wrist exoskeleton, READAPT, via kinematic analysis of redundant pointing tasks

Training coordinated hand and wrist movement is invaluable during post-neurological injury due to the anatomical, biomechanical, and functional couplings of these joints. This paper presents a novel rehabilitation device for coordinated hand and wrist movement. As a first step towards validating the new device as a measurement tool, the device transparency was assessed through kinematic analysis of a redundant finger pointing task requiring synergistic movement of the wrist and finger joints. The preliminary results of this new methodology showed that wearing the robot affects the kinematic coupling of the wrist and finger for unconstrained pointing tasks. However, further experiments specifying a subset of the solution manifold did not exhibit the same difference between robot and no robot trials. The experiments and analysis form a promising method for the characterization of multi-articular wearable robots as measurement tools in robotic rehabilitation.