Stroke represents one of the leading causes of upper limb impairment. Labor-intensive and hospitalized-based rehabilitation treatments account for a significant part of the annual cost for stroke rehabilitation (\$45.5 billions in the US). In recent years, rehabilitation robotics has made progress toward the development of wearable technologies to promote the portability of assistive devices and enable home rehabilitation. The majority of the existing portable rehabilitation gloves for the hand and/or wrist are actuated by conventional actuators (e.g., electrical, hydraulic and pneumatic actuators). A wearable and lightweight glove for wrist flexion and extension rehabilitation is proposed herein. The device is powered by novel Twisted and Coiled Artificial Muscles (TCAMs), able to overcome the limitations of bulky and noisy conventional actuators. In particular, carbon-fiber/silicone-rubber (CF/SR) based TCAMs have shown significant capabilities: they are able to lift up to 12,600 their own weight and provide tensile strokes and specific work up to 60% and 758 J/kg, respectively, with less than 0.2 V/mm of the input voltage. Our wearable glove is designed to provide wrist flexion and extension capabilities by means of antagonistic TCAMs, connected to elastomer rings. The length and cross section of each TCAM has been designed according to kinematic and dynamic analyses, respectively. Additional elastomer tubes have been designed to provide proper thermal insulation between the glove and the users’s skin. The final device has a total weight of 0.13 kg and is able to provide 49 N of force, 56° and 40° of wrist extension and flexion, respectively, with an input voltage of only 0.16 V/mm. These promising results represent a first step towards the development of TCAMs-based human-assistive robotic devices.


Rehabilitation Glove Powered by Twisted and Coiled Artificial Muscles

Division / Sponsors: 
Aerospace Division

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/SMASIS/SMASIS2020/volume/84027

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