Ricerc@Sapienza

Hand rehabilitation is fundamental after stroke or surgery. Traditional rehabilitation
requires a therapist and implies high costs, stress for the patient, and subjective evaluation of
the therapy effectiveness. Alternative approaches, based on mechanical and tracking-based gloves,
can be really effective when used in virtual reality (VR) environments. Mechanical devices are often
expensive, cumbersome, patient specific and hand specific, while tracking-based devices are not
affected by these limitations but, especially if based on a single tracking sensor, could suffer from
occlusions. In this paper, the implementation of a multi-sensors approach, the Virtual Glove (VG),
based on the simultaneous use of two orthogonal LEAP motion controllers, is described. The VG is
calibrated and static positioning measurements are compared with those collected with an accurate
spatial positioning system. The positioning error is lower than 6 mm in a cylindrical region of interest
of radius 10 cm and height 21 cm. Real-time hand tracking measurements are also performed, analysed
and reported. Hand tracking measurements show that VG operated in real-time (60 fps), reduced
occlusions, and managed two LEAP sensors correctly, without any temporal and spatial discontinuity
when skipping from one sensor to the other. A video demonstrating the good performance of VG
is also collected and presented in the Supplementary Materials. Results are promising but further
work must be done to allow the calculation of the forces exerted by each finger when constrained by
mechanical tools (e.g., peg-boards) and for reducing occlusions when grasping these tools. Although
the VG is proposed for rehabilitation purposes, it could also be used for tele-operation of tools and
robots, and for other VR applications.