Modeling and design of a soft pneumatic finger for hand rehabilitation

Abstract

In China, there are such a huge amount of the physical disabled demanding rehabilitation devices to assist their activities of daily living (ADL). Among all the parts of body, hand is the most dexterous and multifunctional so that its rehabilitation is complex and difficult. The soft finger detailed in this paper could help the disable hand bend and extend in a large range of safety. Its components (extending deformation and bending actuator) get analyzed from three aspects including theoretical derivation, finite element modeling and experimental verification. Then the structure of the soft finger is designed and proves to be validated. This work serves as a guideline for designing soft robot hand for specific application such as rehabilitation hand and industrial gripper for soft grasping.