A Lightweight, Soft Wearable Sleeve for Rehabilitation of Forearm Pronation and Supination

Forearm disabilities can result from a number of diseases or injuries, such as stroke, spinal cord injuries (SPI), and acquired/traumatic brain injuries (ABI/TBI). Patients with forearm disabilities suffer from daily activities and follow-up care and rehabilitation are critical to recovery of the patients in this case. However, they have to make personal trips to clinics or hospitals for follow-up treatments since most of existing devices available are bulky, heavy and even expensive in general, discouraging the patients from having them home. This paper proposes a pneumatic inflatable rehabilitation device designed with bio-inspiration. The device is lightweight, safe, and affordable compared to conventional devices. When the actuators of the device are inflated, the contractions of the actuators mimic the motions of the human muscles of the forearm, assisting pronation and supination. The actuators are made of heat-sealable fabrics using a custom-built patterning system. This system facilitates rapid fabrication of repetitive and complex sealing patterns. Also, the proposed rehabilitation device, which can be conjointly used with typical clothing materials, provides comfort for the user by easily conforming the three-dimensional geometries of the forearm. To characterize the system, the angles and the torques of the wrist generated by the device were measured. The result of simple closed-loop control using a vision feedback was also presented.