Textile fabrics are compliant, lightweight, and inherently anisotropic, making them promising for the design of soft pneumatic actuators. In this article, we present the design, modeling, and evaluation of a class of soft fabric-based pneumatic actuators (SFPAs) for soft wearable assistive gloves that can simultaneously assist the thumb abduction and finger flexion and extension motions for brachial plexus injury patients. We investigate the mechanical behaviors of various woven fabrics and rib weft-knitted fabric structures, guiding us to design a thumb-abduction SFPA, a finger-flexion SFPA, and a finger-extension SFPA. We further develop a mathematical model to evaluate the influence of the geometric parameters on the blocked tip forces of the finger-flexion SFPAs and extension torques of the finger-extension SFPAs, which are also verified by the experimental results. We then integrate our SFPAs into a soft wearable assistive glove with a portable control system. The glove is finally tested on a healthy volunteer and a brachial plexus injury patient. The clinical evaluation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our designed glove in assisting hand motions and grasping tasks.

中文翻译：

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用于柔软可穿戴辅助手套的基于织物的气动执行器的设计、建模和评估。

纺织面料柔顺、重量轻且固有各向异性，使其有望用于软气动执行器的设计。在本文中，我们介绍了一类基于柔软织物的气动致动器 (SFPA) 的设计、建模和评估，该气动致动器 (SFPA) 用于可同时辅助臂丛神经损伤患者的拇指外展和手指屈伸运动的可穿戴辅助手套。我们研究了各种机织织物和罗纹纬编织物结构的力学行为，指导我们设计了拇指外展 SFPA、手指屈曲 SFPA 和手指伸展 SFPA。我们进一步开发了一个数学模型来评估几何参数对手指​​屈曲 SFPA 的阻塞尖端力和手指伸展 SFPA 的伸展扭矩的影响，这也得到了实验结果的验证。然后，我们将我们的 SFPA 集成到带有便携式控制系统的柔软可穿戴辅助手套中。手套最终在一名健康志愿者和一名臂丛神经损伤患者身上进行了测试。临床评估结果证明了我们设计的手套在辅助手部动作和抓握任务方面的有效性。