I-Corps: Wearable Soft Robotic Glove for Hand Assistance and Rehabilitation

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is the development of a soft robotic glove for hand rehabilitation and assistance for recovering stroke patients. Currently, there are over seven million stroke survivors in the US and two-thirds of them experience loss of hand functions. Physical therapy is essential to restore the use of their hand/finger(s), but it may not be affordable or accessible for many stroke patients.

The goal of the proposed wearable soft robotic glove is to enable safe, low-cost, customizable, and dexterous hand assistance in daily tasks, making it easy to use outside clinics. This technology has the potential to change how rehabilitation is administered to patients by enabling therapeutic exercises to be done anytime and anywhere, making rehabilitation more convenient for patients, reducing the workload of physical therapists, and lowering the overall cost of healthcare.

The proposed technology can also be used to rehabilitate impaired users with various types of neurological diseases, or assist healthy users to prevent injuries and improve task performance.

This I-Corps project is based on the development of novel, fabric-reinforced, textile actuators. These actuators are pneumatically driven and can be fabricated using lamination and sewing for fast prototyping and mass production. These actuators exploit unique capabilities including: zero initial stiffness, full collapsibility, high power-to-weight ratio, puncture resistance, and high stretchability.

The actuators can perform the functions of bending, twisting, contraction, elongation, as well as combinations of these motion profiles to support versatile hand activities. Computational models are developed based on the finite element method and experimentally validated to predict the kinematic and force/torque outputs of the actuators. The predictions allow for design optimization and customization.

The users' intents are estimated online using measurements from the onboard soft stretch sensors, which allows volitional control of each soft actuator to support the hand motions. Multiple prototypes of soft robotic gloves have been fabricated. Preliminary results have shown that: 1) users can easily don and doff the gloves by themselves, 2) actuators can be precisely aligned to the human fingers, and 3) the assistive torque can be dynamically adjusted by controlling the pressure inside the actuator.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.