Design Requirements of Generic Hand Exoskeletons and Survey of Hand Exoskeletons for Rehabilitation, Assistive or Haptic Use

Abstract: Most current hand exoskeletons have been designed specifically for rehabilitation, assistive or haptic applications to simplify the design requirements. Clinical studies on post-stroke rehabilitation have shown that adapting assistive or haptic applications into physical therapy sessions significantly improves the motor learning and treatment process. The recent technology can lead to the creation of generic hand exoskeletons that are application-agnostic. In this paper, our motivation is to create guidelines and best practices for generic exoskeletons by reviewing the literature of current devices. First, we describe each application and briefly explain their design requirements, and then list the design selections to achieve these requirements. Then, we detail each selection by investigating the existing exoskeletons based on their design choices, and by highlighting their impact on application types. With the motivation of creating efficient generic exoskeletons in the future, we finally summarize the best practices in the literature.