Design of a Grasp Assistive Glove for ADL-focused, Robotic Assisted Therapy after Stroke

Reaching to grasp is an essential process in our everyday lives. Individual who suffer a stroke experience major deficits in this ability leading to compromised activities of daily living (ADL), employment, and social interaction. Robotic aided therapy is at the forefront of stroke rehabilitation, however not many systems support functional goal oriented therapy using real world objects. We are interested in designing a grasp assistive component for our ADL-focused robotic therapy environment. This paper reports on the glove development and a static validation study to determine the accuracy and repeatability of the glove in the measurement of joint angles of the thumb and index fingers and grasp aperture, which is the distance between the fingers. Our results showed no significant differences between the glove and a hand-held goniometer for the measured joint angles and the derived grasp aperture. The results suggest that the glove is repeatable and has the potential to measure in vivo grasp aperture during a functional tasks. Our next steps are to complete a dynamic validation study and integrate the glove with our robotic environment.