A Sensor Glove for the Interaction with a Nursing-Care Assistive Robot

According to World Health Organization, the number of elderly people will rise rapidly between 2015 and 2050. Rates of physical disability or mobility problems are increasing due to population aging. With the continuous evolution of robotic technology, assistive robot shows great prospect to expand the existing healthcare services to address the above problems. As a result, nursing-care robotic systems are playing more and more important role to the elderly and disabled. In this paper, a sensor glove which is employed for human-robot interaction in an assistive robotic system is designed, produced and evaluated. The sensor glove is based on flex sensors which is utilized to detect user's finger gestures and inertial measurement unit (IMU) which is used to detect arm movements of the user and other off-the-shelf electronic components. The main goal of this research is to make the interaction between human and assistive robots more intuitive and reliable. This paper mainly deals with three issues: 1) inventing a design pattern of this kind of sensor gloves, 2) performance evaluation of sensor gloves based on flex sensors, and 3) method of analyzing the human-in-the-loop system with the presence of the sensor glove. Our experimental results suggested that by using this design pattern, the sensor glove can be a reliable interface in controlling the assistive robotic system. Besides, our estimation model can be used in analyzing this human-in-the-loop assistive robotic system and able to find suitable parameters of this system theoretically.