Soft printable pneumatics for wrist rehabilitation

Abstract

Stroke is a leading cause of disability worldwide. Rehabilitation is necessary to recover from such disability. However due to growing manpower constraints and greying populations, patients receive limited rehabilitative care. In recent years, soft robotics is slowly becoming more popular as a choice of technology for robot-assisted rehabilitation. Traditional methods of fabricating soft actuators typically require the use of mold-casting, which is a multi-step process. Therefore, this work aimed to adopt a single-step printable pneumatics technique to fabricate soft bending actuators for wrist rehabilitation. The printed pneumatic actuator showed increased bending curvature and force output with greater input air pressure. Based on our preliminary testing, we found that the soft wrist rehabilitation device, based on soft actuators developed using a printable pneumatics approach, is able to guide the wrist model and the human wrist through flexion-extension motions.