A 10-17 DOF Sensory Gloves with Harvesting Capability for Smart Healthcare.

We present a 10-17 Degrees of Freedom (DoF) sensory gloves for Smart Healthcare implementing an energy harvesting architecture, aimed at enhancing the battery lasting when powering the electronics of the two different types of gloves, used to sense fingers movements. In particular, we realized a comparison in terms of measurement repeatability and reliability, as well as power consumption and battery lasting, between two sensory gloves implemented by means of different technologies. The first is a 3D printed glove with 10 DoF, featuring low-cost, loweffort fabrication and low-power consumption. The second is a classical Lycra® glove with 14 DoF suitable for a more detailed assessment of the hand postures, featuring a relatively higher cost and power consumption. An electronic circuitry was designed to gather and elaborate data from both types of sensory gloves, equipped with flex sensors, differing for number of inputs only. Both gloves allow the control of hand virtual limbs or mechanical arts in surgical, military, space and civil applications. The proposed gloves were already individually evaluated in terms of repeatability, reproducibility and reliability, but in this work their performances are compared also in terms of power consumption, because a particular effort was devoted in this case to increase battery lasting for both systems, developing an Energy Harvesting (EH) system with the electronics relaying on Radio Frequency, Piezoelectric and Thermoelectric harvesters, and applying it to the gloves for the first time. The harvesting part was built and tested as a prototype discrete element board, that is interfaced with an external microcontroller and a radiofrequency transmitter board. Measurement results demonstrated a meaningful improvement in battery operation time up to 25%, considering different operating scenarios, for both glove systems, which exhibited not very different power consumption and therefore battery duration, in spite of different DoF measuring capabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]