Development and control of a hand exoskeleton for rehabilitation

Hand injuries are a frequent problem. The great amount of hand injuries is not only a problem for the affected people but economic consequences follow because rehabilitation takes a long time. To improve therapy results and reduce cost of rehabilitation a hand exoskeleton was developed. For research on control algorithms and rehabilitation programs a prototype supporting all four degrees of freedom of one finger was build (s. Fig. 1). In view of the fact that a lot of hand injuries affect only one finger, this prototype could already be functional in physical therapy. A robust sliding mode controller was proposed for motion control of the hand exoskeleton. The performance of the proposed controller was verified in real experiments and compared to that of traditional PID controller.