Sensory glove and surface EMG with suitable conditioning electronics for extended monitoring and functional hand assessment

We propose and evaluate a new method for measuring and discriminating among flexion, extension, abduction and adduction movements of hand fingers. In particular, flex sensors allowed registering flexionextension movements, whereas data from multi-channel surface electromyography (sEMG) electrodes allowed discriminating adduction-abduction movements of thumb, index and middle fingers. An electronic interface was designed to acquire and pre-process signals feeding a Personal Computer (PC), running indigenously made routines for data recording, visualization and storing. A novel test for repeatability and reproducibility was also proposed and successfully adopted.