Characteristics of a Piezo-Resistive Fabric Stretch Sensor Glove for Home-Monitoring of Rheumatoid Arthritis

This paper presents a potential connected health solution for home-monitoring of Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) patients. About one percent of the world´s population is affected by RA and to maintain their quality of life these people must perform exercises to maintain function in their joints. Home monitoring is a key tool in learning about the effects and treatments these diseases. This paper compares an in house developed sensor glove based on piezo-resistive fabrics with a motion capture VICON Nexus system. The results from these experiments deem the glove to be a suitable mode of measuring the hand movements while being cheap to manufacture. Wearable fabric sensors have potential to become more accessible than high spec camera systems and expensive commercially available motion capture gloves. They have the advantage of being low-cost and smart fabric sensors are more comfortable to wear compared to systems based on conventional metallic components.