Supporting data for “Soft robotic gloves for elderly assistance”

<p dir="ltr">People may weaken or even lose hand functions due to illness, accidents, or aging. The hand, as the most flexible organ, plays a vital role in human-environment interactions. Therefore, compliant hand robots, assisting hand movement or force compensation, have brought new hope for the elderly with weak muscle strength to train hand functions or assist in activities of daily life.</p><p dir="ltr">User-centric design is important for wearable hand robots. Therefore, soft robotics technology provides design insights for developing portable, safe, and comfortable hand robots, but also brings new challenges. The development of portable and practical ergonomic wearable robotic systems has always been a pivotal research direction in the field of soft robotics.</p><p dir="ltr">This thesis aims to develop new actuation methods for robotic gloves, design safe and ergonomic human-robot interfaces, and benchmark the performance of robotic gloves in assisting sarcopenia patients. First, this research investigates intelligent actuation in robotic gloves. An electro-conductive fiber-reinforced phase transition actuator is proposed, which can control single-joint rotation of robotic gloves without complex pneumatic elements. In addition, this research also leads to the design of a novel untethered actuation, called compressing bellow actuation (CBA), for controlling both linear contraction and fluidic pressure using a single motor. A robotic glove driven by the double-acting soft actuators (DASA) controlled by the CBA systems is developed. The DASA assist hand functions with tendon-driven finger flexion and pneumatic finger extension.</p><p dir="ltr">Secondly, this research has also developed flat tube based soft actuators. By braiding flat tubes with springs, coil-reinforced flat tube actuators (CFTAs) are proposed. CFTAs can achieve diverse deformations by programming the patterns of flat tubes. Based on CFTA, a robotic glove is developed with a compact structure, an omnidirectional bending actuator to achieve adduction and abduction of the thumb. Additionally, by concisely folding the flat tube, a pre-folded flat tube actuator (PFTA) is designed. A PFTA can directly apply torque at the rotational joint. The PFTA-based robotic glove exhibits low cost, light weight, and high comfort.</p><p dir="ltr">Thirdly, this work pioneered quantitative studies on the impact of human-robot interfaces in the case of robotic gloves. The skin on the back of the hand was divided into 24 regions according to different finger joints, and 30 subjects were invited to conduct statistical measurements of the skin elongation through visual methods. Extending type elastomer-constrained flat tube actuators are assembled into a constraint-free strap interface and a fabric glove to investigate the effect of skin movement. Results show that hindering skin motion will cause less range of motion, less grip strength output, and discomfort in robotic glove design.</p><p dir="ltr">Finally, bending type elastomer-constrained flat tube actuators are used to design a robotic glove for sarcopenia patients to compensate for finger stiffness when lifting heavy objects for a long duration. A 5 kg dumbbell lifting test is designed to evaluate the assistance performance of the robotic glove via the muscle activities, grip strength decrease ratio, and lifting time, which proves the practicability of the robotic glove at the physiological level, functional level, and behavior level, respectively.</p>