Exo-Glove: A Wearable Robot for the Hand with a Soft Tendon Routing System

Abstract

Soft wearable robots are good alternatives to rigid-frame exoskeletons because they are compact and lightweight. This article describes a soft wearable hand robot called the Exo-Glove that uses a soft tendon routing system and an underactuation adaptive mechanism. The proposed system can be used to develop other types of soft wearable robots. The glove part of the system is compact and weighs 194 g. The results conducted using a healthy subject showed sufficient performance for the execution of daily life activities, namely a pinch force of 20 N, a wrap grasp force of 40 N, and a maximum grasped object size of 76 mm. The use of an underactuation mechanism enabled the grasping of objects of various shapes without active control. A subject suffering from paralysis of the hands due to a spinal cord injury was able to use the glove to grasp objects of various shapes.