Evaluation of a 1-DOF Hand Exoskeleton for Neuromuscular Rehabilitation

A low-cost 1-DOF hand exoskeleton for neuromuscular rehabilitation has been designed and assembled. It consists of a base equipped with a servo motor, an index finger part, and a thumb part, connected through three gears. The index part has a tri-axial load cell and an attached ring to measure the finger force. An admittance control paradigm was designed to provide intuitive control and positive force amplification to assist the user’s finger movement. To evaluate the effects of different control parameters on neuromuscular response of the fingers, we created an integrated exoskeleton-hand musculoskeletal model to virtually simulate and optimize the control loop. The exoskeleton is controlled by a proportional derivative controller that computes the motor torque to follow a desired joint angle of the index part, which is obtained from inverse kinematics of a virtual end-effector mass driven by the finger force. We conducted parametric simulations of the exoskeleton in action, driven by the user’s closing and opening finger motion, with different proportional gains, end-effector masses, and other coefficients. We compared the interaction forces between the index finger and the ring in both passive and active modes. The best performing assistive controller can reduce the force from around 1.45 N (in passive mode) to only around 0.52 N, more than 64% of reduction. As a result, the muscle activations of the flexors and extensors were reduced significantly. We also noted the admittance control paradigm is versatile and can also provide resistance (e.g. for strength training) by simply increasing the virtual end-effector mass.