Exploiting a Wearable Extra-Finger for Haptic Applications

This extended abstract presents the design of a wearable device for haptic stimulation of hand palms and phalanges. Most of the wearable haptic devices for hand palms are based on a parallel structure, that guarantees good precision and stiffness but presents workspace limitations and encumbrance problems. In this work, we improve the design of a wearable extra-finger, previously designed to augment human hands and to provide assistance for people affected by hand and upper-limb diseases to apply as a haptic device. To employ this device for haptics applications, we provided it an additional adduction/abduction degree of freedom and we modified the fingertip/end-effector to include a micro force sensor.