Design and Evaluation of an Electrooculogram-Activated Three-Dimensional-Printed Soft Hand Exoskeleton for Activities of Daily Living

Hand exoskeletons are primarily designed for hand-impaired individuals to grasp objects of daily living to live a more independent life. Recent advances in soft robotics offer new perspectives and benefits. This article presents a three-dimensional (3D)-printed soft hand exoskeleton and an assessment protocol, i.e., hand exoskeleton assessment protocol (HEAP). The exoskeleton is printed using thermoplastic polyurethane material and is equipped with an electrooculogram (EOG) to manipulate the finger flexion and extension. A voluntary blink activates the exoskeleton and grips using a current control and finger position. The HEAP evaluates the hand exoskeleton’s ability to perform tasks such as grasping, lifting, rotating, and releasing an object. The grasp lift rotate (GLR) score quantifies these tasks’ success as a metric. It was tested on a healthy human hand and a 3D-printed hand. The results demonstrate the feasibility of the design to grasp, lift, rotate, and release a wide range of objects in Yale-CMU-Berkeley benchmark object sets, such as a tennis ball, screwdriver, and card. The results also indicate that the exoskeleton performed better on a human hand than a 3D-printed hand. The human hand successfully gripped all 15 objects, whereas the 3D-printed hand managed to grip 11 objects. The GLR score averages 3.79 with the human hand and 2.7 with the 3D-printed hand. These findings show the protocol’s potential in evaluating the performance of a hand exoskeleton in activities of daily living.