A novel soft robotic glove with positive-negative pneumatic actuator for hand rehabilitation

Pneumatic soft robots show great potential application value in the field of hand rehabilitation. This paper presents a novel pneumatic soft robotic glove for hand rehabilitation with a portable pneumatic box. The glove uses positive-negative pneumatic actuator made of bellows, which is very light (only 149g), easy to wear, comfortable, customizable, safe, easy to make, and low-cost. The matching portable pneumatic box is compact in size and lightweight, which not only has six outputting gas paths, but also adjust pressure and flow. Within the allowable range of motion, the glove can assist affected hand to achieve flexion and extension of five fingers, and adduction and abduction of the thumb. The output force of the actuators is experimentally measured. For the flexion/extension actuator, the maximum force is 4.6N when extending and 1.9N when flexing. For the adduction/abduction actuator, the maximum force is 8.1N when adducting and 5.7N when abducting. In addition, demonstration with complete system is performed to do a functional evaluation, which verified the practical availability of the glove in rehabilitation training.