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A soft-packaged and portable rehabilitation glove capable of closed-loop fine motor skills

Nature Machine Intelligence volume 5, pages 1149–1160 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

Regaining fine motor skills (FMSs; that is, the ability to make precise and coordinated movements of fingers) is the ultimate goal of hand rehabilitation. Although robotic-assisted technologies have been widely explored to help patients with simple hand activities, existing rehabilitation gloves still lack sensory feedback for closed-loop control or involve bulky external hardware, incapable of providing precise FMSs rehabilitation portably. Here we develop a soft rehabilitation glove that can accomplish diverse FMSs by integrating 15 bending sensors and 10 shape-memory-alloy (SMA) actuators. Three joint angles of each finger can be precisely sensed and thus are fed to the control system to actuate SMAs in a closed-loop manner. A touchable human–machine interface is also integrated to provide facile interaction for multi-modal rehabilitation exercises. Weighing only 0.49 kg, our soft glove has high portability, allowing for repetitive hand rehabilitation as needed. We validate that our glove can assist an individual with hand impairments after a stroke to realize a set of single and complex FMS rehabilitation exercises and to complete some activities of daily living.

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Fig. 1: A soft-packaged and portable rehabilitation glove capable of closed-loop FMSs.
Fig. 2: General design and working principle of the soft glove.
Fig. 3: Biomimetic design of fingerstall with joint angle sensing capability.
Fig. 4: Design of dual-SMA actuators with closed-loop controllability.
Fig. 5: FMS rehabilitation on an individual after a stroke with an impaired hand.
Fig. 6: FMS rehabilitation and daily assistance for an individual after a stroke.

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Data availability

The authors declare that the main data supporting the findings of this study are available within the article and its Supplementary Information files. Other data, if needed, can be available upon request.

Code availability

All the relevant codes are available at https://github.com/weibayang/rehabilitation_glove (ref. 65).

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (numbers 51975550, U21A20119, 12272369 and 51705495), National Key Research and Development Program of China (number 2022YFC2408100), Provincial Key Research and Development Program of Anhui Province (number 202104h04020004), Natural Science Foundation of Anhui Province of China under Grant 2008085UD02, and Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (WK5290000002).

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Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Mengli Sui, Yiming Ouyang, Hu Jin.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. CAS Key Laboratory of Mechanical Behavior and Design of Materials, Department of Precision Machinery and Precision Instrumentation, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China

    Mengli Sui, Yiming Ouyang, Hu Jin, Zhenyi Chai, Changyang Wei, Min Xu & Shiwu Zhang

  2. CAS Key Laboratory of Mechanical Behavior and Design of Materials, Department of Modern Mechanics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China

    Jiyu Li & Liu Wang

  3. State Key Laboratory of Nonlinear Mechanics, Institute of Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Science, Beijing, China

    Jiyu Li & Liu Wang

  4. School of Mechanical, Materials, Mechatronic and Biomedical Engineering, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia

    Weihua Li

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Contributions

Conceptualization: M.S., H.J., L.W. and S.Z. Methodology: M.S., Y.O., H.J., Z.C. and C.W. Investigation: M.S., Y.O., H.J., Z.C., C.W. and J.L. Visualization: M.S., Y.O., H.J., J.L., L.W. and S.Z. Funding acquisition: H.J., L.W. and S.Z. Project administration: H.J., L.W. and S.Z. Supervision: H.J., L.W. and S.Z. Writing—original draft: M.S., H.J. and L.W. Writing—review and editing: M.S., H.J., M.X., W.L., L.W. and S.Z.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Hu Jin, Liu Wang or Shiwu Zhang.

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Competing interests

M.S., Y.O., H.J. and S.Z. are inventors of an invention disclosure of the patent filed by University of Science and Technology of China (ZL202011284541.3, granted on 13 May 2022) related to this work. The other authors declare no competing interests.

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Peer review information

Nature Machine Intelligence thanks Xiaonan Huang for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Primary Handling Editor: Trenton Jerde, in collaboration with the Nature Machine Intelligence editorial team.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Text, Tables 1–3, Figs. 1–17 and legends for Supplementary Videos 1–10.

Reporting Summary

Supplementary Video 1

Overview of the soft-packaged and portable rehabilitation glove.

Supplementary Video 2

Human–machine interface.

Supplementary Video 3

Test of the maximum contact force of the fingertip.

Supplementary Video 4

Comparison of the noise level between various actuations.

Supplementary Video 5

Design of bending sensors.

Supplementary Video 6

Single-mode FMS rehabilitation on an individual with normal hands.

Supplementary Video 7

Switch-mode FMS rehabilitation on an individual with normal hands.

Supplementary Video 8

Single-mode FMS rehabilitation on a poststroke individual with an impaired right hand.

Supplementary Video 9

Switch-mode of FMS rehabilitation on a poststroke individual with an impaired right hand.

Supplementary Video 10

Assisted daily tasks on a poststroke individual.

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Sui, M., Ouyang, Y., Jin, H. et al. A soft-packaged and portable rehabilitation glove capable of closed-loop fine motor skills. Nat Mach Intell 5, 1149–1160 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-023-00728-z

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