A survey on wearable hand robotics design for assistive, rehabilitative, and haptic applications

This study presents a comparative analysis to be a resource for those who want to work in the wearable hand robot field. The fact that robotic rehabilitation is more accessible than classical methods and shows promising results increases interest in it. When the last 20 years are analyzed, the number of studies in this field has increased continuously, without exception. According to Google Scholar data, 17,200 studies were conducted only in 2022 related to hand rehabilitation robots. When the literature is reviewed, thousands of studies are faced with design and control systems that seem to have been designed into many different types and structures. The number of studies reviewing and surveying some of these is also insufficient to solve the confusion in the minds of the researchers in a shorter way. Rather than reporting what other researchers have done, our work is based on classifying and putting concepts together instead of creating dozens of sub-categories. We aim to inform researchers who are interested in the field but are hesitant, to create a template in their minds, and to suggest the most beneficial design alternatives in terms of mechanics and hardware-software implementations. The most cited and recent studies were selected, and a systematic categorization was made based on criteria such as kinematic design, control system, and actuator type. The kinematic categorization it employs is an original classification specific to this study and has been applied to all models examined.