Soft Robotic Exogloves for Dexterous Mobility -- Towards Personalized Rehabilitation

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Article Summary

Soft robotic exogloves can provide hand rehabilitation and assistance. Fitting these gloves often relies on standardized measurements not tailored to the individual, limiting their effectiveness, especially for fine articulation necessary for dexterous manipulation. We present the design, fabrication, modeling, and testing of a personalized pneumatically-actuated soft robotic exoglove. The glove was fit to a user's hand with topological scans and fabricated with silicone mold casting. Finite element analysis (FEA) was performed to evaluate actuator bending and forces from physical human-robot interaction (pHRI) between an actuator and a simplified personalized biomechanical finger model. Pneumatic pressure control experiments were conducted to flex the user's finger with static and dynamic references. Fabrication results show that topological scans enable precise tailoring to hand anatomy. Simulations showed that anatomical personalization enables analysis of pHRI contact forces, and results indicate sufficient joint mobilization with non-ideal compression on the proximal phalanx. Pneumatic testing indicates that pressure control allows accurate and targeted mobility of the metacarpophalangeal (MCP) and proximal interphalangeal (PIP) joints with intrinsic stiffness. Testing of multiple designs showed that relaxing the strain-limiting layer improves actuator-to-finger joint alignment during actuation. This work presents personalization to the human hand in structural conformability, joint topology, modeling of pHRI contact, and time-dependent actuation-deformation profiles. This lays a groundwork for informing exoglove design optimization to enable assistance in dexterous manipulation and neuromuscular rehabilitation of fine motor skills.

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