Rehabilitative Hand Exoskeleton System: A New Modular Mechanical Design for a Remote Actuated Device

Abstract

The interaction with a highly complex anatomical morphology, the high performance in conjunction with the limits of the bearable wearability, and the frequent change of user make the development of rehabilitative devices for the hand a real engineering challenge. Considering the described scenario, the Department of Industrial Engineering of the University of Florence, in collaboration with MOV'IT S.r.l., has developed a modular remote actuated system with noteworthy characteristics. An overview of the mechanical design is reported.

Variable Admittance Control of a Hand Exoskeleton for Virtual Reality-Based Rehabilitation Tasks

“…As already reported, both these characteristics are crucial when it comes to rehabilitative robot systems as the basis for the implementation of safe, customizable, engaging, and stimulating VR-based exercises for patients. The tests have been conducted involving a single healthy subject (male, 27 years old, trained to interact with the HES and the VR) as the exoskeleton geometry is optimized to fit a specific target hand (as reported in Bartalucci et al, 2020 ). Since the admittance control strategy is decentralized and replicated over each finger with a shared Webots VR, for the sake of simplicity, just the results of a single finger are reported.…”

“…The BMIFOCUS hand exoskeleton has been designed by a research team from the Mechatronics and Dynamic Modeling Laboratory (MDM Lab) at the Department of Industrial Engineering of the University of Florence (UNIFI DIEF) and MOV'IT S.r.l. (Pisa, Italy) as an innovative HES for Assistance-As-Needed (AAN) rehabilitation for tasks, such as grasping and pinching (Bartalucci et al, 2020 ). The previous exoskeleton already addressed the issue of mechanically reproducing complex finger kinematics with great accuracy exploiting a single-DOF rigid kinematism (Conti et al, 2017 ).…”

“…The previous exoskeleton already addressed the issue of mechanically reproducing complex finger kinematics with great accuracy exploiting a single-DOF rigid kinematism (Conti et al, 2017 ). This innovative device has been realized in the framework of the BMIFOCUS research project (funded by the Tuscany Region, Italy) on the basis of a previously developed prototype (Bartalucci et al, 2020 ). The HES has been redesigned to satisfy the new project requirements:…”

“… 5 According to the HES architecture presented in Bartalucci et al ( 2020 ), the finger mechanism end-effector acts on the corresponding finger middle phalanx. …”