Hand Exoskeleton Design and Human-Machine Interaction Strategies for Rehabilitation

Stroke and related complications such as hemiplegia and disability create huge burdens for human society in the 21st century, which leads to a great need for rehabilitation and daily life assistance. To address this issue, continuous efforts are devoted in human-machine interaction (HMI) technology, which aims to capture and recognize users' intentions and fulfil their needs via physical response. Based on the physiological structure of the human hand, a dimension-adjustable linkage-driven hand exoskeleton with 10 active degrees of freedom (DoFs) and 3 passive DoFs is proposed in this study, which grants high-level synergy with the human hand. Considering the weight of the adopted linkage design, the hand exoskeleton can be mounted on the existing up-limb exoskeleton system, which greatly diminishes the burden for users. Three rehabilitation/daily life assistance modes are developed (namely, robot-in-charge, therapist-in-charge, and patient-in-charge modes) to meet specific personal needs. To realize HMI, a thin-film force sensor matrix and Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) are installed in both the hand exoskeleton and the corresponding controller. Outstanding sensor-machine synergy is confirmed by trigger rate evaluation, Kernel Density Estimation (KDE), and a confusion matrix. To recognize user intention, a genetic algorithm (GA) is applied to search for the optimal hyperparameters of a 1D Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), and the average intention-recognition accuracy for the eight actions/gestures examined reaches 97.1% (based on K-fold cross-validation). The hand exoskeleton system provides the possibility for people with limited exercise ability to conduct self-rehabilitation and complex daily activities.