Design of an exoskeleton for index finger rehabilitation

This paper presents a new exoskeleton with 4 degrees of freedom (DOF) for index finger rehabilitation. The device can generate bi-directional movement for all joints of the finger through cable transmission, which is required for passive and active trainings. With two prismatic kinematic joints in the design, it can accommodate to some extent variety of hand sizes. The kinematic relation between the device joint angles and the corresponding finger joint angles is simple which greatly simplifies the high level motion control. As the motor capability of patients may be different and the range of motion of the finger may change along with the rehabilitation progress, it is important to take the changes into consideration. And the preliminary experiment has shown that the proposed device is capable of accommodating to these varieties.