Design and Characterization of Soft Actuator for Hand Rehabilitation Application

In biomedical application, conventional hard robots have been widely used for a long time. However, when they come in contact with human body especially for rehabilitation purposes, the hard and stuff nature of the robots have received a lot of drawbacks as they interfere with movement. Recently, soft robots are drawing attention due to their high customizability and compliance, especially soft actuators. In this paper, we present a soft pneumatic bending actuator and characterize the performance of the actuator such as radius of curvature and force output during actuation. The characterization was done by a simple measurement system that we developed. This work serves as a guideline for designing soft bending actuators with application-specific requirements, for example, soft exoskeleton for rehabilitation.