Optimal design and control of a hand exoskeleton for rehabilitation of stroke patients

Abstract

This paper deals with the optimal design and control of an exoskeletal robot hand for the rehabilitation of stroke patients. First, the grasping motion data from the fingers of a normal subject was captured using a vision system. As the human finger joints cannot be modeled by single revolute joints due to changing instantaneous centre of rotation, we have used 4-bar mechanisms to model each joint. Optimal 4-bars have been designed using genetic algorithms, by minimizing the error between a coupler point and points traced by the finger links. It is shown that the designed 4-bars can accurately track the motion of the human fingers. The exoskeleton is controlled by using the EMG signals obtained from the subject’ muscles. The relation between the EMG and finger motion is first learned, using a neural net. Based on the learned parameters, the subjects EMG signal is used to control a simulation of the exoskeleton joint motion. A comparison between Recurrent Neural Network and Multi Layer Perceptron for classifying and mapping the EMG to finger position was also carried out.