• DESC
• feedback
• glove
• hand
• PVDF.
• rehabilitation
• sensory
• stroke
• vibrotactile
• wearable

Stroke is one of the leading causes of death in the world, and in survivors is often accompanied by chronic impairments of the upper limbs. Damages on the contralateral sensorimotor area affect the integration of tactile sensitivity into motor control leading to a loss in coordination in performing essential daily living activities. Several sensory-based techniques focus on providing augmented feedback to stimulate neural plasticity for rehabilitation with promising outcomes. The systems used for this purpose however result complex, require structured environments and risk to create an overreliance on the augmented feedback during the training. In this work, a prototype of a wearable sensing glove was designed to provide vibrotactile feedback following a Discrete Event-based Sensory feedback Control (DESC) strategy in sensory-based rehabilitation of the hand, called the DESC glove. In this glove PolyVinylidene Fluoride (PVDF) sensors at the fingertips are used to detect contact events in manipulation tasks and signal the user with eccentric-mass vibrators placed on the forearm. A new graphical user interface has been developed to control the glove in clinical scenarios. The DESC glove has been tested on 19 healthy participants in a pick-and-lift task. Observed results on sensitivity and false positive rate showed promising results on system’s performance encouraging further experiments with stroke survivors to validate the effectiveness of the device in stroke rehabilitation.