INVESTIGATING THE DESIGN OF A SOFT ROBOT FOR FINGER REHABILITATION

US National Health Interview Survey in 2018 found that 61 million adults aged 18 and over have disabilities. Physical rehabilitation is often prescribed to people with disabilities during their recovery process to regain their mobility. There are several rehabilitation robots available on the market. Some are made with rigid, stiff materials with limited flexibility and may be uncomfortable for patients to wear for an extended amount of time. Some recently developed rehabilitation robots are made with flexible materials like those found in living organisms, which are characterized as "soft robots". Soft robots are generally made with polymers and actuated by pressurized gas inside of the polymer structure and potentially will be more comfortable to wear. Unlike most other soft robots with external tubes and pipes for fluid flows, in this paper, we are proposing a soft robot is actuated by heat. Our soft robot is designed by sealing a phase changing material (PCM) inside of several chambers made by polymer structure. When heat is applied, the PCM begins to change phase and the pressure inside the sealed chambers increases and expand the polymer structure to create a movement of the soft robot. In this study, we focus on constructing simulation models using ANSYS Fluent to examine the parameters relevant to our intended design. We also present a prototype to be tested in the future work.