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Session: Poster session I
Session starts: Thursday 24 January, 15:00

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Serdar Ates (PhD Student)
Israel Mora Moreno (Research Engineer)
Piet Lammertse (Manager)
Arno Stienen (Assist. Prof. Dr.)
Herman van der Kooij (Prof. Dr.)

Abstract:
Hand and wrist orthoses (also known as exoskeletons) have been used for several years for the rehabilitation of stroke patients. Recent development in robot-mediated rehabilitation has shown the potential of robotic devices that are delivering repetitive training thus allowing for a large number of repetitions to be delivered during acute and chronic phases of stroke rehabilitation. There is growing evidence that such technologies are beneficial to patient’s recovery of functional and motor outcome. It is crucial to measure some values such as angular position/velocity, force/torque applied on the links. This information is used as feedback in control algorithms of orthosis. It is also a quantitative information for the physiotherapist to monitor patients’ recovery progress. It is very difficult to provide a cheap and affordable solution which does not impede the natural movements of human hand in order to measure the angular position of fingers and thumb. The number of degree of freedom of the hand excluding wrist is 20. Besides, the space is very limited to put both mechanical and electronic hardware for the measurement. All these facts make human hand anatomy very complex to be integrated with robotic devices. In order to overcome these difficulties, simple sensors such as flex sensors which are simply variable resistors according to angle displacements are used. These measurements are used in an approximation algorithm in order to estimate required angular positions and force values. Lower price and relatively less complexity allow them to be used as a cheap and affordable solution.