We have seen a lot of people who are unaware about the problems caused by Finger Stroke, being not aware of this kind of problem can lead to serious things like not being able to use their fingers at all also known as dead fingers.
Finger Stroke has been something where the medical industry haven’t worked much on since people don’t consider it as a medical emergency which when neglected in the future might lead to numbness and weakness of the finger’s muscle.
Finger Stroke is a major problem which cannot be neglected in any manner. When a stroke occurs, the fingers may experience increased tone or stiffness due to disrupted connections between the brain and the finger muscles.
Usually the strong signs of improving the finger stroke is a repetitive rehabilitation of finger muscles by a repeated contraction and relaxation without any external assistance from any person.
Fing-Re works on user controlled bluetooth device where he/she could train themselves by using our prototype wherein while using Fing-Re, the user could perform exercises in the form of compression and relaxation via controlling the finger's movement using his/her mobile device.
Basically, the pulley movement across the fingers and also at the structure tends to pull or relax the user's fingers accordingly as explained above. The DC motors come into action here where they rotate anticlockwise to each other in our project.
So we Team Pi, present you our own mechanical prototype called Fing-Re. Fing-Re simply works on using DC motors, a Motor Shield and the brain Arduino.
Further to make it much more efficient and reliable to use, and being Physics students we utilized The Pulley Principle in order to provide comfort to the user, such as to provide a smooth relaxation and compression of the user’s hands.
Exercise in this form of manner for these patients helps them to improve their movement of finger's muscles. It might help in preventing the numbness of the muscles too.
So you wish to know the working then follow me along with the below mentioned points
- Making a Bluetooth controlled kart requires arduino uno, bluetooth sensor, motor shield, some jumper wires, 2 dc motors, breadboard, some batteries around 6, your mobile phone, some coding and Mechanix Frameworks.
- Motor Shield - The Motor Shield is a driver module for motors that allows you to use Arduino to control the working speed and direction of the motor.
- We started with making an app from MIT app inventor to control the movement of the kart using your mobile phone. We added some basic directions which are Forward, Backward, Left and Right. We took help from referring tutorials from RoboIndia.
- Now we moved on making the structure of the Kart. Using Mechanix frameworks for building up the structure required to follow the basic principles of physics. The pulley's were put up in such a manner to compress and relax from the DC motors.
- For making the base structure, we also started by making sketches to get an overview of the profile of the Prototype.
- Following this we head to the electronics area where we started of by connecting arduino uno and motor shield first. Using a breadboard for having the bluetooth sensor we connected it with the motor shield such as to make the kart follow the directions which the user taps on his/her device.
- Now in order to supply the power we used a battery containing 6 cells to power up the arduino uno.
- So for the code part of arduino, you could head to the file above and have a jist of it.
To tackle this current major problem which we observed in many people especially who are in their old age, we look forward in adding voice controlled automation and also in order to observe the user's progress in real time we want to capture the user's fingers poses in every possible manner.
So we'll be entirely honest it wasn't easy as we expected it to be since the pulleys used to move a lot from their original place, Then also to control the speed of motors such that it doesn't hurt the user's fingers and also to compress and relax upto a threshold limit.
