Glove input for gamified wrist rehablitation

Project GitHub repo

CHALLENGE

Rehabilitation exercises can be repetitive, tedious, and boring. Besides, it is challenging to perform right exercise forms for novices without professional guidance.

DESIGN DETAILS

Unlike our pressure ulcer prevention wearable patch application, which is mostly digitaly designed and fabricated, this glove application represents a more DIY approach of our fabrication workflow.

We used an off-the-self fingerless glove (mainly nylon spandex fabrics) with thumb hole as the base double-coating fabric and the brush-coating method to coat areas according to hands' joint places.

Since this application cannot be 100% digitally quantified and gloves vary, we do not have a CAD design file for this design as the pressure ulcer prevention sensor patch application. But the workflow we used can be the same even with different gloves:

• wear the glove on your hand(s), mark areas of joints (in our case, we marked three areas) that you want to sense bending with an erasable pen
• take off the glove, brush-coat these areas using our method
• connect conductive silver fabric and processor&output components according to the diagram below (we used the vibrator for the output, while you can choose alternatives from our output components list)
• The A0 is for strain sensing of the metacarpophalangeal joint
• The A1 is for the output signal of the glove (to drive the vibration motor, in our case)
• The A2 is for strain sensing of the side wrist joint
• The A3 is for strain sensing of the back wrist joint

IMPLEMENTATION

As shown before, we used three analog pins on the processor to read the resistance of three brush-coated strain sensing areas. We used Arduino and Processing visualize this sensing process:

We also further used its sensing property and implemented it to a Unity game, where holding the right gesture for a pre-difined time is needed to guide the rabbit to eat a carrot. The map of the maze can also be tailored to realize different excercise sequences. Using this game, we hope to make the wrist rehabilitation more interesting.

All source code for Arduino demonstration and the Unity game can be found on the Github repository of this application.

OUTCOME

Through this application we show that everyday textile accessories can easily be endowed with input functionalities using brush-coating. A glove is brush-coated to augment it into a wearable bend input for gamified rehabilitation training. It can capture exercise motions and thus control game objects, such as moving a rabbit to eat carrots. When wrong motions or incorrect exercise forms are detected, the glove can be set to vibrate to alert the user. Personalized exercise sequences can be tailored by customizing game maps, making dull rehabilitation training more engaging.