A Wearable Mechatronic Glove for Resistive Hand Therapy Exercises

Recent technological improvements are consistently improving the efficacy of wearable mechatronic devices designed to support rehabilitation. However, it has been identified that there is currently a limited number of devices that can perform resistive motion tasks. To address this limitation, a Wearable Mechatronics-Enabled (WearME) Glove has been developed to support rehabilitative motion tasks. Using the WearME Glove, a control system was developed to enable the performance of resistive finger and wrist motion tasks. An initial evaluation of the device applied to rehabilitation tasks shows that average control errors of 2.4% and 1.5% were achieved for a resistive finger task and a resistive wrist flexion-extension task, respectively. In addition, an analysis of each task showed that for the index finger, the thumb and the wrist motion, an average of 69%, 76% and 83% of the duration, respectively, were being resisted by the WearME Glove. The results of this study show that the WearME glove can provide consistent resistance to the finger and wrist for different rehabilitation tasks.