A Portable Tailor-Made Exoskeleton for Hand Disabilities

In a society where robots are increasingly more pervasive and the number of wearable robotic devices is remarkably growing, investigating the robot interactions with the human hand plays a key role. In fact since the hand has a crucial part in everyday life, much effort has been undertaken in providing robotic assistance to those people who have lost their manual dexterity [1,2]. One of the most ambitious aspects in this field is represented by the users’ acceptance of the device, which depends on several features: comfort, lightness, small dimensions, user-friendly design, and straightforward active use of these hand exoskeletons. The development of a compact and tailormade device capable of accurately following the fingers’ natural trajectories represents a challenging aspect in this scenario. In this chapter the development process of a low-cost and fully wearable hand exoskeleton will be discussed. Starting from a one-degree-of-freedom (DOF) kinematic architecture, three different versions of the prototype have been sequentially developed to match step-by- step the user’s needs both in terms of comfort and usability. Three dedicated sections will describe the main accomplishments each version has reached, from the manufacturability assessment of the developed finger mechanism kinematic chain to an assistive device directly actuated by the user.