A Study on the Rehabilitation Hand Exoskeletons

Within the frame of BRAVO (a project that aims at the development of an advanced robotic system for the rehabilitation of post-stroke patients with diseases at the upper limb), the authors are directly involved in the design of a hand exoskeleton (or active hand orthosis) intended to restore the patient’s ability to grasp objects as a fundamental step for the rehabilitation of functional autonomy in the everyday living. The analysis of the state-of-art is the first step of our activity, preceding the design phase. This paper proposes a systematic classification of the reviewed systems based on two main key issues, namely the degrees of freedom of a finger exoskeleton and the number of contact points with the human finger phalanges. This classification is helpful to understand the reason of proposing certain solutions for the different applications and the advantages and drawbacks of the different designs proposed in the literature.