Design and development of a hand rehabilitation robot for patient-cooperative therapy following stroke

Stroke is very common and always leads to severe hand impairment. Traditional robotic systems have been introduced to assist therapy for a long time and already achieved certain effect. However, with further development of therapy strategies in the last few years, higher request to the rehabilitation robot has been put forward. Thus, we are developing a novel hand rehabilitation robot named HIT-glove to provide patient-cooperative therapy for hand-impaired post-stroke patients. In this paper, the mechanical design of the actuated hand exoskeleton is detailed and the control strategy for patient-cooperative therapy is introduced. The actuated hand exoskeleton, which can be applied to hands in different sizes and shapes, is able to bilaterally actuate every joint of the fingers. The patient-cooperative control strategy, based on the sensing system and an interactive interface, is well designed to let the patient actively participate into the therapy. Besides, to get a better effect of functional rehabilitation of the hand, our robot is expected to provide the following two categories of therapy: motor function exercise for joints and movement coordination training for fingers.