REACT: Rehabilitation Exoskeleton for Assisted Coordination of Tendon Therapy

Tendon injuries are among the most common hand injuries, and recovery after surgical repair requires early, controlled finger motion: enough tendon excursion to prevent adhesions, without loading that could damage the repair. Conventional therapy depends on therapist-applied motion and gives limited quantitative feedback.

REACT is a wearable finger exoskeleton for controlled tendon therapy. Instead of bulky motors it uses shape memory alloy springs, compact lightweight actuators that contract when heated, with separate actuator units for flexion and extension. Their force reaches the finger through flexible cables routed along the natural tendon pathway, keeping the part worn on the hand light and comfortable. A closed-loop controller guides the finger along a precise, repeatable trajectory, while sEMG monitoring verifies that the patient stays relaxed and the system does the work.

Results so far

The system has been evaluated with ten healthy volunteers. Repeated passive finger motion was delivered along the prescribed therapy trajectory with good-to-excellent session-to-session reliability, and forearm muscle activation stayed near baseline. REACT is therefore established as a proof-of-concept platform for controlled, exoskeleton-driven tendon rehabilitation.

What comes next

Development continues toward more advanced rehabilitation stages: active and assist-as-needed training, adaptive modulation of the assistance, improved safety and portability, and control personalised to patient-specific performance. A journal manuscript is under review at the Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation, and two patent applications covering the system design and its current-regulation circuit are under review at the Turkish Patent and Trademark Office.