Modeling and Simulation of a Novel Exoskeleton Hand for Rehabilitation

This paper presents a new architecture of an exoskeleton for the index finger rehabilitation. The design proposed is focused in the rehabilitation of people with diseases that affect the physical functions of the human hand that allows the movement of the metacarpophalangeal joint (MCP) and proximal interphalangeal joint (PIP) of the index finger. This paper shows a new architecture of a new exoskeleton of 3 DOF to the movement of each finger of the hand, the structure of the proposed exoskeleton presented in this work has been based on human hand capabilities as the ranks of motion and physical length as important criteria. The paper presents the static analysis to know all the forces that actuate in the links of the exoskeleton. The geometrical approach has been used in this paper for position analysis in order to find joint angles for the different configurations. The paper contains numerical examples to prove the analytical results.