A lightweight tendon-driven hand exoskeleton with dual-safety mechanism for grasp assistance

초록

In recent years, with the growing rehabilitation needs of individuals with hand functional impairments, enhancing the precision and safety of grasping assistance while ensuring the lightweight design and wearing comfort of the device has become a key challenge in the design of tendon-driven hand exoskeletons. To address this, this study proposes a lightweight tendon-driven hand exoskeleton system that achieves stable assistance for hand functions through a dual-hand collaborative control architecture and a dual-safety strategy. The wearable glove module weighs 53 g, while the total system mass, including actuation and control components, is 718 g. The system employs a traction structure based on double-grooved roller, combined with pressure sensors and motor-angle limitation mechanisms to enhance grasping safety. Additionally, it incorporates proportional-derivative force feedback control based on force sensing resistor to improve control precision. By comparing electromyography signal changes between wearing and not wearing the exoskeleton, the EMG activity of key hand muscle groups decreased by up to 78.7%, significantly outperforming the non-wearing state. Additionally, in Anthropomorphic Hand Assessment Protocol-based grasping tests involving 16 everyday objects, the 15 healthy participants achieved a mean score of 92.19%. Using predefined scoring criteria, these results demonstrated the system's grasp-assistance performance across the tested tasks and provided preliminary device-level evidence for future rehabilitation-oriented applications.

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