Control of Newly-Designed Wearable Robotic Hand Exoskeleton Based on Surface Electromyographic Signals

The human hand plays a role in a variety of daily activities. This intricate instrument is vulnerable to trauma or neuromuscular disorders. Wearable robotic exoskeletons are an advanced technology with the potential to remarkably promote the recovery of hand function. However, the still face persist...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Frontiers in neurorobotics Vol. 15; p. 711047
Main Authors: Li, Ke, Li, Zhengzhen, Zeng, Haibin, Wei, Na
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Frontiers Media S.A 15.09.2021
Subjects:
exoskeleton
gesture recognition
hand rehabilitation
Neuroscience
surface electromyography
wearable robots
ISSN:1662-5218, 1662-5218
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:The human hand plays a role in a variety of daily activities. This intricate instrument is vulnerable to trauma or neuromuscular disorders. Wearable robotic exoskeletons are an advanced technology with the potential to remarkably promote the recovery of hand function. However, the still face persistent challenges in mechanical and functional integration, with real-time control of the multiactuators in accordance with the motion intentions of the user being a particular sticking point. In this study, we demonstrated a newly-designed wearable robotic hand exoskeleton with multijoints, more degrees of freedom (DOFs), and a larger range of motion (ROM). The exoskeleton hand comprises six linear actuators (two for the thumb and the other four for the fingers) and can realize both independent movements of each digit and coordinative movement involving multiple fingers for grasp and pinch. The kinematic parameters of the hand exoskeleton were analyzed by a motion capture system. The exoskeleton showed higher ROM of the proximal interphalangeal and distal interphalangeal joints compared with the other exoskeletons. Five classifiers including support vector machine (SVM), K-near neighbor (KNN), decision tree (DT), multilayer perceptron (MLP), and multichannel convolutional neural networks (multichannel CNN) were compared for the offline classification. The SVM and KNN had a higher accuracy than the others, reaching up to 99%. For the online classification, three out of the five subjects showed an accuracy of about 80%, and one subject showed an accuracy over 90%. These results suggest that the new wearable exoskeleton could facilitate hand rehabilitation for a larger ROM and higher dexterity and could be controlled according to the motion intention of the subjects.
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Reviewed by: Chen Chen, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China; Hui Zhou, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, China
Edited by: Dingguo Zhang, University of Bath, United Kingdom
ISSN:1662-5218
1662-5218
DOI:10.3389/fnbot.2021.711047