A Study on the Robot Structure of Hand for the Rehabilitation Training of Stroke Patients

The rehabilitation training robots for treating the upper limbs of stroke patients were mainly focused on the upper proximal treatment of it, but recently studies of the distal parts of the upper limbs for rehabilitation of the hand is making some progress even though it is still a small number so far. In this paper, we present the hand robot for the rehabilitation training of stroke patients that is the fingertip contact-typed mechanism, and it has also equipped with the wrist rehabilitation unit to be worked like human hand that enables any movements through mutual cooperation by fingers while picking up or grasping objects. The robot that is presented for this purpose supports the movement of fingers with 5-DoF and the wrist with 3-DoF that moves independently, and operates with a structure that allows the joints of the wrist and fingers to be collaborated organically together to each other. Also, hereby the simulation and evaluation test on its robot mechanism are performed to ensure that fingers with 5-DoF and the wrist with 3-DoF of the serial kinematical mechanism are designed to comply with or exceed ROM for ADL.