Design and Assessment of a Single-size Semi-soft Assistive Mitten for People with Cervical Spinal Cord Injuries

Welcome! This website supplements our ICHR 2019 submission, in which we presents a novel orthosis design, the Semi-soft Assistive Glove (SAG), which utilizes a slim dorsal leaf spring and underactuated cable drive to improve the hand functionality of individuals with C6/C7-SCI, in a way that is robust to variations in hand size.

Assistive orthoses have been designed to augment the hand grasping capabilities of individuals with spinal cord injuries (SCI). Exoskeletons have long been an attractive technology to actuate the hand; however, due to the individual variance of hand size and the nonlinear rotation of human joints, joint misalignment between rigid linkages of these devices and the user can cause discomfort and inefficiencies. This paper presents a novel orthosis design, the Semi-soft Assistive Glove (SAG), which utilizes a slim dorsal leaf spring and underactuated cable drive to improve the hand functionality of individuals with C6/C7-SCI, in a way that is robust to variations in hand size. A prototype is developed based on simulation studies, and grasping performance of the proposed design is validated with five healthy subjects. All the subjects can grasp balls and bottles using the glove. These empirical results, along with user feedback, suggest that the SAG has a comfortable and intuitive design for long-term, independent daily use for a range of hand sizes.