Motion Evaluation of a Finger Exoskeleton for Rehabilitation

Stroke is responsible for a large number of injured limbs. The hand is of major importance for activities of daily living and any malfunction can result in difficulties to handle the simplest tasks. Current clinical strategies are still not close to fully restoring patients’ limbs. During the past decades, several devices have been developed to assist in hand rehabilitation, although only a few are designed for finger rehabilitation. A prototype of a finger exoskeleton with one cable-actuated degree of freedom was developed. There are two different assemblies for the exoskeleton. In order to evaluate the device, the workspace and resulting angles of the fingertip, distal and proximal interphalangeal joints with respect to the metacarpophalangeal joint during free index finger flexion were com-pared to the same movements when the finger was actuated by the exoskeleton. Results showed that the device is capable to achieve more than 70% of free hand fingertip workspace during flexion.