Banana Fingers: MIT Develops Robotic Glove for Assistive Hand Movement and Sensing Experience

Experts from MIT recently developed a new assistive wearable innovation by using the principles of soft robotics. The latest invention could be utilized for people who have challenges in skills involving their hands like touching, holding, and grasping.

Banana Fingers as New Rehabilitative Device for Hand

The new rehabilitation device is compressed by air to give its wearer an advantage to feel the same experience that person gets with their hands.

Alongside hand gestures and holding actions, the robotic instrument is embedded with a program that offers the users soft touch and sensing capabilities that a normal hand does, unlike conventional robotic gloves that do not contain an ergonomic design and are hard to maneuver.

According to the developers of the robotic gloves, the designing and assembly of the device is quite challenging as it needs to be constructed with specialized fabrication materials that should be manually formed under trial and error phases,

Due to the modern technologies available, scholars from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory or CSAIL were able to develop a new fabrication pipeline known as 'PneuAct.'

The said pipeline utilizes a computational process that perfects the knitting process of a material in order to create an accurate design that is equipped with digital type of fabric and soft knitting actuators, Yahoo reports.

The development of the glove's knitting process could be utilized not just for creating the new robotic gloves but also in other instruments that can be modified to improve rehabilitation procedures that rely on assistive devices.

Advancement in Soft Robotics, Digital Fabrication, and Pneumatic Actuators

The MIT researchers explained that creating these 'banana fingers' uses an approach that is unlike the conventional knitting process. The software that designs and produces it also embeds the actuators and how it moves, TechCrunch reports. In addition, the specialized fabrication could also be stimulated right before it is printed out for assembly.

The textile material used for the robotic gloves can be modified from an affordable rubber silicone tube, making a fully functioning actuator, the experts added.

This new glove design was a product of previous designs developed by the MIT CSAIL team. To enable a near-human-like experience, the experts chose a bending structure, when inflated and that could relay feedback to its users in real-time.

The banana fingers could be utilized for people who have hand conditions that hinder them from feeling or touching things. It supports a finger muscle movement that adds an extra force for the individual in order to prevent damage and heal from any injuries related to the fingers and hand.

Soft pneumatic actuators are the best materials for the gloves, as it offers flexible and compliant properties fitting to what a normal hand does and, when combined with an intelligent program, become a promising backbone of robotic research and other assistive technologies, said MIT CSAIL specialist and lead author of the study Yiyue Luo.

The study was published in the journal CHI 2022, titled "Digital Fabrication of Pneumatic Actuators with Integrated Sensing by Machine Knitting.

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