Comparison of flexible and rigid hand-grip control during a feed-forward visual tracking task

Repetitive retraining of grip function is critical for stroke patients to regain functional abilities. Therefore, we have developed ‘GripAble’, a low-cost but sensitive hand-grip promoting independent and repetitive rehabilitation of grasp function based around a novel flexible structure. An initial usability study was performed on (N = 34) healthy subjects to compare user interaction between this flexible structure and an equivalent completely rigid version during a predictive feed-forward visual tracking task. Results indicate that at similar or higher tracking performance level, there was a highly significant user preference for the flexible hand-grip with over 62% of subjects preferring it compared to 26% for the rigid device.