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Flexohand: A Hybrid Exoskeleton-Based Novel Hand Rehabilitation Device
Home-based hand rehabilitation has excellent potential as it may reduce patient dropouts due to travel, transportation, and insurance constraints. Being able to perform exercises precisely, accurately, and in a repetitive manner, robot-aided portable devices have gained much traction these days in h...
Autores principales: | , , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
MDPI
2021
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8621726/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34832686 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/mi12111274 |
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author | Ahmed, Tanvir Assad-Uz-Zaman, Md Islam, Md Rasedul Gottheardt, Drew McGonigle, Erin Brahmi, Brahim Rahman, Mohammad Habibur |
author_facet | Ahmed, Tanvir Assad-Uz-Zaman, Md Islam, Md Rasedul Gottheardt, Drew McGonigle, Erin Brahmi, Brahim Rahman, Mohammad Habibur |
author_sort | Ahmed, Tanvir |
collection | PubMed |
description | Home-based hand rehabilitation has excellent potential as it may reduce patient dropouts due to travel, transportation, and insurance constraints. Being able to perform exercises precisely, accurately, and in a repetitive manner, robot-aided portable devices have gained much traction these days in hand rehabilitation. However, existing devices fall short in allowing some key natural movements, which are crucial to achieving full potential motion in performing activities of daily living. Firstly, existing exoskeleton type devices often restrict or suffer from uncontrolled wrist and forearm movement during finger exercises due to their setup of actuation and transmission mechanism. Secondly, they restrict passive metacarpophalangeal (MCP) abduction–adduction during MCP flexion–extension motion. Lastly, though a few of them can provide isolated finger ROM, none of them can offer isolated joint motion as per therapeutic need. All these natural movements are crucial for effective robot-aided finger rehabilitation. To bridge these gaps, in this research, a novel lightweight robotic device, namely “Flexohand”, has been developed for hand rehabilitation. A novel compliant mechanism has been developed and included in Flexohand to compensate for the passive movement of MCP abduction–adduction. The isolated and composite digit joint flexion–extension has been achieved by integrating a combination of sliding locks for IP joints and a wire locking system for finger MCP joints. Besides, the intuitive design of Flexohand inherently allows wrist joint movement during hand digit exercises. Experiments of passive exercises involving isolated joint motion, composite joint motions of individual fingers, and isolated joint motion of multiple fingers have been conducted to validate the functionality of the developed device. The experimental results show that Flexohand addresses the limitations of existing robot-aided hand rehabilitation devices. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-8621726 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2021 |
publisher | MDPI |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-86217262021-11-27 Flexohand: A Hybrid Exoskeleton-Based Novel Hand Rehabilitation Device Ahmed, Tanvir Assad-Uz-Zaman, Md Islam, Md Rasedul Gottheardt, Drew McGonigle, Erin Brahmi, Brahim Rahman, Mohammad Habibur Micromachines (Basel) Article Home-based hand rehabilitation has excellent potential as it may reduce patient dropouts due to travel, transportation, and insurance constraints. Being able to perform exercises precisely, accurately, and in a repetitive manner, robot-aided portable devices have gained much traction these days in hand rehabilitation. However, existing devices fall short in allowing some key natural movements, which are crucial to achieving full potential motion in performing activities of daily living. Firstly, existing exoskeleton type devices often restrict or suffer from uncontrolled wrist and forearm movement during finger exercises due to their setup of actuation and transmission mechanism. Secondly, they restrict passive metacarpophalangeal (MCP) abduction–adduction during MCP flexion–extension motion. Lastly, though a few of them can provide isolated finger ROM, none of them can offer isolated joint motion as per therapeutic need. All these natural movements are crucial for effective robot-aided finger rehabilitation. To bridge these gaps, in this research, a novel lightweight robotic device, namely “Flexohand”, has been developed for hand rehabilitation. A novel compliant mechanism has been developed and included in Flexohand to compensate for the passive movement of MCP abduction–adduction. The isolated and composite digit joint flexion–extension has been achieved by integrating a combination of sliding locks for IP joints and a wire locking system for finger MCP joints. Besides, the intuitive design of Flexohand inherently allows wrist joint movement during hand digit exercises. Experiments of passive exercises involving isolated joint motion, composite joint motions of individual fingers, and isolated joint motion of multiple fingers have been conducted to validate the functionality of the developed device. The experimental results show that Flexohand addresses the limitations of existing robot-aided hand rehabilitation devices. MDPI 2021-10-20 /pmc/articles/PMC8621726/ /pubmed/34832686 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/mi12111274 Text en © 2021 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
spellingShingle | Article Ahmed, Tanvir Assad-Uz-Zaman, Md Islam, Md Rasedul Gottheardt, Drew McGonigle, Erin Brahmi, Brahim Rahman, Mohammad Habibur Flexohand: A Hybrid Exoskeleton-Based Novel Hand Rehabilitation Device |
title | Flexohand: A Hybrid Exoskeleton-Based Novel Hand Rehabilitation Device |
title_full | Flexohand: A Hybrid Exoskeleton-Based Novel Hand Rehabilitation Device |
title_fullStr | Flexohand: A Hybrid Exoskeleton-Based Novel Hand Rehabilitation Device |
title_full_unstemmed | Flexohand: A Hybrid Exoskeleton-Based Novel Hand Rehabilitation Device |
title_short | Flexohand: A Hybrid Exoskeleton-Based Novel Hand Rehabilitation Device |
title_sort | flexohand: a hybrid exoskeleton-based novel hand rehabilitation device |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8621726/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34832686 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/mi12111274 |
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