Mechanical Design and Development of Passive, Assistive and Rehabilitative Tendon Driven Device for Enhancing Grasping Capabilities

Abstract

The human body is properly functional if it does not face any kind of issue like a stroke or an accident. The stroke can result in drastically hampering the hand motor function of the human body. Passive and active assistive devices are getting common day by day to help get back lost-hand strength and agility. Soft robotics is employed in the project which is an amalgamated discipline of classical robotics’ principles and soft materials. It can make way to a new plethora of passive assistive devices which can also rehabilitative in nature. Soft robotic passive assistive devices can bring a human robot interaction with the use of compliant and frivolous structures. The domain of this work was to show that a light weight, compliant and cable driven fabric based soft robotic glove (a mobile device designed for home use) can assist and also rehabilitate people effected by spinal cord injury in daily life work. Mechanical exo-gloves have gotten an expanded enthusiasm throughout the most recent decade mainly due to their appreciation by the users. Potential uses of these frameworks extend from increasing the capacities of reestablishing the versatility of people that experience the ill effects of loss of motion or stroke and the people who have lost one or both of their limbs. In spite of the critical advancement in the field, most existing arrangements still require an outside power source to work, and they are not comfortable to wear. In this research work, we center around the design of a versatile (autonomous and consistent), tendon driven, wearable exo-gloves and we propose a conservative, reasonable, and lightweight assistive gadget that enhance the handling abilities of the patients. The gadgets are tentatively tried and their effectiveness is approved through clinical testing on patients with disability of one and two limbs. The gadgets can fundamentally improve the grasp force of the client. This body-fueled device has long life and low expense and hence provides an effective solution.