Design of a finger exoskeleton for hand rehabilitation / Fan Baoyuan

Fan, Baoyuan (2021) Design of a finger exoskeleton for hand rehabilitation / Fan Baoyuan. Masters thesis, University of Malaya.

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Abstract

A large number of people who suffer from the impairment of hand due to the consequences of stroke, aging, and trauma. They lost the ability to grasp and the basic function of hands movements. It caused so much problems and inconvenience for patients because hands are extremely important in both work and life. Thus, a device to aid, assist and rehabilitate the fingers’ movement is necessary and called upon. Many researches have investigated into the possibilities of various approaches to tackle the issue. Therefore I designed and manufactured a novel exoskeleton device in order to reach a rehabilitation goal for hand and fingers. Servo motor and Arduino uno were adopted to build the device. The methodology was used in this project is quantitative approach to determine the degree of the PIP joint of each finger, and use two different measurement which are conventional way and Kinovea way. The design process and the manufacture process were conducted in the lab at Kuala Lumpur, the data were collected in China, all the participants are Chinese. Their age is between 13 to 34. 19 subjects were participated in the experiments. They were asked to performed a set of movements for right hand fingers. They need to flex their fingers into the maximum angles and extend into minimum angles, therefore reaching extremes of motion. Only the right hand was needed and only the data at PIP joints were recorded. The differences for degree of ROM among subjects were discussed, and differences of the degree of ROM of each joint were discussed. By comparing with the data, we can conclude that the device can mimic real hands and finger movements for rehabilitation goal.

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