Home robotic device for rehabilitation of finger movement of hemiplegia patients

In current health care system, it is difficult to have sufficiently long period of rehabilitation in hospital. Therefore, an automated rehabilitation support at home is needed. To this end, we developed a simple robotic device that will support index finger rehabilitation for patients who suffer from aftereffects of hemiplegia. The purpose of the device is to foster voluntary movement of index finger. It has pressure sensors for all fingers, and a power assisted index finger lift mechanism. The power assist lift supports to lift the patient's finger if the lift by voluntary movement is insufficient. The pressure sensors are used to monitor the simultaneous movement of all fingers. By this, the system checks if undesirable movements such as synergetic movements are found. The information is integrated to provide a quantitative measure of recovery. Patients are able to monitor his/her condition and continue rehabilitation as needed. Our device is simple and compact so that it should be placed on a desk at home. The device is used by placing the patient's hand on keyboards. This allows the patients to see his/her fingers during rehabilitation and is expected to enhance the effect of rehabilitation by seeing the result of voluntary movement at his/her real fingers. This paper shows these concepts and the hardware design of this device in detail. This paper also discusses the results of the measurement of hemiplegia patients and the healthy subjects by this device. The results show that the explicit difference was seen between the patients and the healthy subjects, which shows the effectiveness of this design.