Design and control of an exoskeleton based device for hand rehabilitation

Over the past two decades, there has been a growing need to develop rehabilitation robots able to perform passive repetitive movements for patients with traumatic injuries. In this paper, a new exoskeleton-based design is proposed that imitates natural hand movements for rehabilitation purposes. For controlling the motion of the proposed design, we subsequently designed five different controllers, computed torque control (CTC), PD, PID, and two sliding mode controllers (SMC). It was shown that the second sliding mode controller resulted in improved trajectories that were chosen based on the natural hand movements. The proposed design along with the sliding mode controller has the potential to be used as a continues passive machine (CPM) resulting in improved recovery of injured hand for patients after stroke or post surgical training.