Soft Robotic Glove with Sensing and Force Feedback for Rehabilitation in Virtual Reality

Many diseases, such as stroke, arthritis, and spinal cord injury, can cause severe hand impairment. Treatment options for these patients are limited by expensive hand rehabilitation devices and dull treatment procedures. In this study, we present an inexpensive soft robotic glove for hand rehabilitation in virtual reality (VR). Fifteen inertial measurement units are placed on the glove for finger motion tracking, and a motor—tendon actuation system is mounted onto the arm and exerts forces on fingertips via finger-anchoring points, providing force feedback to fingers so that the users can feel the force of a virtual object. A static threshold correction and complementary filter are used to calculate the finger attitude angles, hence computing the postures of five fingers simultaneously. Both static and dynamic tests are performed to validate the accuracy of the finger-motion-tracking algorithm. A field-oriented-control-based angular closed-loop torque control algorithm is adopted to control the force applied to the fingers. It is found that each motor can provide a maximum force of 3.14 N within the tested current limit. Finally, we present an application of the haptic glove in a Unity-based VR interface to provide the operator with haptic feedback while squeezing a soft virtual ball.