Fabrication of a Soft Hand Orthosis to Enhance the Function of Digits in Patients with Hand Muscle Weakness

Motor units’ malfunction, which happens due to stroke, often affects patients’ hand motion and subsequently restricts their daily activities and social participation. All these factors reduce the patient’s life quality. Therefore, finding a solution to overcome these limitations and improving hand function seems to be valuable. So far, many efforts have been done to design and develop different types of rehabilitation systems. Among all these systems, soft systems have attracted great attention due to their light weight, flexibility, safe interaction and affordability. The goal of this study is to fabricate a soft rehabilitation glove for hand function retrieval so that patients can perform rehabilitation exercises individually. The rehabilitation system presented here includes two different control modes including on/off and proportional modes. Each of them is selected based on patients’ needs. For verification purposes, trajectories of the finger tips were obtained in two modes: “using the glove” and “without using the glove”. Results showed that trajectories of the finger tips in the "using the glove" mode follow a proper path for the user’s digits.