Data Glove System Embedded With Inertial Measurement Units for Hand Function Evaluation in Stroke Patients

• Published in: IEEE transactions on neural systems and rehabilitation engineering Vol. 25; no. 11; pp. 2204 - 2213
• Main Authors: Lin, Bor-Shing, Hsiao, Pei-Chi, Yang, Shu-Yu, Su, Che-Shih, Lee, I-Jung
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States IEEE 01.11.2017
• Subjects: Action monitoring; Adult; Aged; Algorithm design and analysis; Algorithms; Biomechanical Phenomena; data glove; Data gloves; Female; Fingers - physiopathology; Hand - physiopathology; hand function evaluation system; Hand Strength; Healthy Volunteers; Humans; inertial sensor; Kinetics; Male; Middle Aged; Physical Therapy Modalities - instrumentation; Prosthesis Design; Psychomotor Performance; Quaternions; Read only memory; Reproducibility of Results; Rotation; Sensors; Software; stroke; Stroke - diagnosis; Stroke - physiopathology; Stroke Rehabilitation - instrumentation; Stroke Rehabilitation - methods; Thumb; Wearable Electronic Devices
• ISSN: 1534-4320; 1558-0210
• DOI: 10.1109/TNSRE.2017.2720727

This paper proposes a data glove system integrated with six-axis inertial measurement unit sensors for evaluating the hand function of patients who have suffered a stroke. The modular design of this data glove facilitates its use for stroke patients. The proposed system can use the hand's accelerations, angular velocities, and joint angles as calculated by a quaternion algorithm, to help physicians gain new insights into rehabilitation treatments. A clinical experiment was performed on 15 healthy subjects and 15 stroke patients whose Brunnstrom stages (BSs) ranged from 4 to 6. In this experiment, the participants were subjected to a grip task, thumb task, and card turning task to produce raw data and three features, namely, the average rotation speed, variation of movement completion time, and quality of movement; these features were extracted from the recorded data to form 2-D and 3-D scatter plots. These scatter plots can provide reference information and guidance to physicians who must determine the BSs of stroke patients. The proposed system demonstrated a hit rate of 70.22% on average. Therefore, this system can effectively reduce physicians' load and provide them with detailed information about hand function to help them adjust rehabilitation strategies for stroke patients.