부산대학교 도서관

This paper presents a novel linkage-transmission hand exoskeleton designed to assist individuals with motor disabilities in completing the grasping of daily living items. Based on the analysis of intra-finger and inter-finger grasping motion, the primary and secondary movements of finger joints and thumb opposability are crucial for completing the grasping task, which provides a foundation for designing assistive hand exoskeletons. Aiming at the grasping characteristics of fingers, an underactuated mechanism based on redundant degrees of freedom is proposed to enable adaptive grasping of objects with different shapes and sizes by the exoskeleton. The proposed exoskeleton is actuated by three motors, allowing for flexion/extension movements (index MCP, PIP joints, and thumb CMC, MCP joints) as well as abduction/adduction movements (thumb CMC joint). Finally, motion transparency and grasping dexterity experiments are conducted on the hand exoskeleton prototype with six healthy subjects. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed exoskeleton can assist the wearer in grasping different objects and exhibits grasping dexterity.