Abstract
Traditional rigid robots exist many problems in rehabilitation training. Soft robotics is conducive to breaking the limitations of rigid robots. This paper presents a soft wearable device for the rehabilitation of hands, including soft pneumatic actuators that are embedded in the device for motion assistance. The key feature of this design is the stiffness of each actuator at different positions is different, which results in the bending posture of the actuator is more accordant with the bending figure of human hand. In addition, another key point is the use of a fabric sleeves allow actuators to gain greater bending force when pressurized, which gives the hand greater bending force. We verified the feasibility of actuator through simulation, the performance of soft actuator and the device also are evaluated through experiments. Finally, the results show that this device can finish some of the hand rehabilitation tasks.
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Acknowledgement
This research is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (51775284), Primary Research & Development Plan of Jiangsu Province (BE2018734), Joint Research Fund for Overseas Chinese, Hong Kong and Macao Young Scholars (61728302), and Postgraduate Research & Practice Innovation Program of Jiangsu Province (SJCX18_0299).
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Guo, Y., Xu, F., Song, Y., Cao, X., Meng, F. (2019). A Soft Robotic Glove for Hand Rehabilitation Using Pneumatic Actuators with Variable Stiffness. In: Yu, H., Liu, J., Liu, L., Ju, Z., Liu, Y., Zhou, D. (eds) Intelligent Robotics and Applications. ICIRA 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11742. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27535-8_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27535-8_12
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