Evaluation of hand direction for stroke patient based on 3R under-actuated robot manipulator

This paper presents a simplified version of hand exoskeleton design for stroke patient. The proposed powered exoskeleton concentrates at the hand of the human body. The simplified design is made using aluminum. The whole system is built with the cost in mind to make it more affordable as the current exoskeleton projects required heavy funding. Rotary Digital Encoder is used as sensors and the data from the sensors transferred out to the computer for keeping the position angle. The control is done using the MATLAB software. The 3R under-actuated robot manipulator consists of three links with three joining (First and Second joints as Active, attached motor and rotary digital encoder to theirself and Third joint as Passive, attach with rotary digital encoder and without motor to itself). A hand movement algorithm has been investigate by two methods; Simulation and Real-time. By using these methods, the hand algorithm has being evaluated in order to control the movement of passive joint according to the instruction during experiment.