An Exoskeleton System for Hand Rehabilitation Based on Master-Slave Control

Most of patients with hand injury lose only one side of the function, a master-slave rehabilitation system can help them to recover by training the disabled hand using the healthy one. In this paper, such a system was presented with several components. A data glove based on bending sensor and a reliable hand recognition algorithm used to capture real-time locomotion data and send data to exoskeleton system through wireless Bluetooth. The drive and control circuit with PWM control strategy kept the shape-memory-alloy (SMA) actuator working well and ensured reliability and safety of the system. An adaptive dorsal metacarpal base with 15 degree of freedom was designed to be attached to patients' palm tightly. Finally, the exoskeleton was fabricated with 3D printing technology, and the performance of the whole system was tested and analyzed.