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This work focuses on the design and the validation of a wearable mechatronic device for an at-home assessment of wrist stiffness in patients affected by Parkinson’s Disease (PD). The device includes one actuated joint and four passive revolute joints with a high overall intrinsic backdriveability. In order to allow the user to freely move the wrist during activities of daily living, we implemented a transparent controller on the basis of the interaction force sensed by the embedded load cell. Conversely, in order to provide perturbations for estimating the wrist flexion-extension rigidity, we implemented a torque controller. Firstly, we report a pilot study that aimed at characterizing the device in terms of range of motion (ROM) allowed, transparency perceived and torque-tracking capability. Then, we present a case study in which we tested our device with seven PD patients in both drug-OFF and drug-ON conditions and we compared the measured stiffness with the one measured in fourteen healthy controls and with the outcome of the most used clinical scale (MDS-UPDRS). The device allowed to successfully estimate the stiffness as different depending on the movement direction. Indeed, extension stiffness was higher than the flexion one, accordingly to the literature. Moreover, the device allowed to discriminate both Healthy subjects from PD subjects, and PD subjects in OFF condition from PD subjects in ON condition. In conclusion, we demonstrate the feasibility of the device in measuring wrist rigidity, thus enabling the possibility to implement an at-home assessment of the PD rigidity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To develop a wrist robotic exoskeleton-type interface (REI) for force interaction, it should have a suitable range of motion similar to human wrist activities of daily living, large torque output performance, and low moving parts inertia for dynamic motion response to cover the human behavior frequency. In this paper, a wrist REI based on a fully actuated coaxial spherical parallel mechanism (CSPM) is proposed to satisfy the aforementioned features. The fully actuated CSPM-based wrist REI (FC-WREI) has the characteristics of pure rotation similar to the human wrist, high torque output by parallel torque synthesis, and low moving parts inertia due to the base arrangement of the actuators. Due to the mechanical advantages and design optimization, the FC-WREI maximally provides torque as much as 56.49–130.43% of the maximum isometric torque of the human wrist, while providing a consistent range of motion to the human wrist without interference problem. Moreover, it is confirmed that the inertia of the FC-WREI is up to 5.35 times lower than similar devices. These advantages of the FC-WREI mean that the device is applicable to various fields of REIs for force interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]