Research Status and Prospect of Finger Rehabilitation Machinery

Abstract

About 80% of stroke patients have hand motor dysfunction, and wearing finger rehabilitation machinery can enable patients to carry out efficient passive rehabilitation training independently. At present, many typical finger rehabilitation machines have been developed, and clinical experiments have confirmed the effectiveness of mechanically assisted finger rehabilitation. In this paper, the finger rehabilitation machinery will be classified in the actuation mode, and the terminal traction drive/motor drive/spring drive/rope drive/memory alloy drive/electroactive material drive/hydraulic drive/pneumatic drive technology and its typical applications are analyzed. Study the structure, control methods, overlap between mechanical bending nodes and finger joints, training modes, response speed, and driving force of various types of finger rehabilitation machinery. The advantages and disadvantages of various actuation methods of finger rehabilitation machinery are summarized. Finally, the difficulties and opportunities faced by the future development of finger rehabilitation machinery are prospected. In general, with the continuous improvement of quality of life, stroke patients need flexible, segmented control, accurate bending, multi-training mode, fast response, and good driving force finger rehabilitation machinery. This will also be a future hot research direction.

Design and Driving Performance Study of Soft Actuators for Hand Rehabilitation Training

“…The future development trend of finger rehabilitation training mechanisms is the ability to perform segmented independent movements and to achieve gas-driven flexibility. 27 Accordingly, this paper designs a soft actuator based on the segmented movements of the human finger, taking the index finger as an example. The index finger has three bending joints (MCP, PIP, DIP) and three phalanges (DP, MP, PP).…”