Design and development of a sensored glove for home-based rehabilitation.

Study Design: Descriptive.

Introduction: Rehabilitation programs that focus on motor recovery of the upper limb require long-term commitment from the clinicians/therapists, require one-to-one caring, and are usually labor-intensive.

Purpose Of The Study: To contribute to this area, we have developed a sensored hand glove integrated with a computer game (Flappy Bird) to engage patients playing a game where the subject's single/multiple fingers are involved, representing fine motor skill occupational therapeutic exercises.

Methods: We described the sensored rehab glove, its hardware design, electrical and electronic design and instrumentation, software design, and pilot testing results.

Results: Experimental results supported that the developed rehab glove system can be effectively used to engage a patient playing a computer game (or a mobile phone game) that can record the data (ie, game score, finger flexion/extension angle, time spent in a therapeutic session, etc.) and put it in a format that could be easily read by a therapist or displayed to the therapists/patients in different graph formats.

Conclusions: We introduced a sensored rehab glove for home-based therapy. The exercise training using the glove is repetitious, functional, and easy to follow and comply with.