A Kinaesthetic Hand Exoskeleton System Toward Robot-augmented Rehabilitation Therapies in the Health 4.0 era

In the new era of Industry 4.0, digitization and automation are the tipping points for addressing rapidly evolving challenges. The momentum of this movement has underscored the critical importance of developing new technologies to collect, understand and use the enormous amount of data created. This revolutionary wave has also taken root in the healthcare sector, giving rise to the so-called Health 4.0, based on smart machines to provide patients with better, more value-added and more efficient healthcare services. This scenario has contributed to making innovative robot-augmented therapies a hot research topic with potentially significant societal impact. In this context, the authors present the implementation of a new prototype of a kinaesthetic exoskeleton to enhance and recover sensorimotor skills to perform grasping and manipulation via force stimuli from serious rehabilitation games. The discussion includes an initial overview of the system's hardware, both from a mechanical and electronic point of view, motivating the choices made in the design phase. It continues by moving on to a description of the system's low-level and high-level software architecture, along with the control strategy applied to implement progressive resistant force therapy. Finally, an example of serious game was developed as an application case for evaluating the system's usability and extrapolating empirical parameters indicative of responsiveness and accuracy. The results showed that the proposed system can reproduce constant forces with an average error of 0.75 N and standard deviation of 0.3 N with an average reaction time of 0.5 s and standard deviation of 0.4 s.