This project develops wearable and functional hand orthoses for stroke survivors, to act as both assistive and training devices. For daily living, such a device could provide assistance with manipulation tasks, increasing the sense of control and the ability to live independently. For rehabilitation, a wearable orthosis could enable functional training on real-world manipulation tasks, extend training beyond the small number of sessions performed in a clinical setting, and provide distributed training during the course of daily activities rather than block training in designated therapeutic sessions. From a healthcare perspective, this work will enable a shift from devices used in a clinic under medical supervision towards unobtrusive functional orthoses used during daily life. From an engineering perspective, it will advance towards a new class of active wearable systems, controllable by natural movement or similarly intuitive interfaces.
New approaches will be required to build a device that is simultaneously dexterous (for complex manipulation), non-intrusive (for daily living) and intuitive to control. To achieve this, we investigate ways to assist joint movement using a network of artificial tendons routed on the surface of the hand and arm, without adding large structural components such as an exoskeleton. A key tenet of our approach is that a hand orthosis can provide meaningful assistance with daily manipulation tasks even when using a number of actuators far smaller than the number of joints in the hand. We will also investigate multiple control methods, including unimanual operation (where endogenous movement of the paretic limb is detected and enhanced) and bilateral operation (where movement of the less affected limb is used to generate control signals for the paretic one).
