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DESIGN OF A HAND DYNAMOMETER FOR TESTING
AND ANALYSIS OF HAND FUNCTIONS
Wan-Seok Ryu, Se-Jong Ahn, Seung-Yong Kang, Sung-Taek Chung
Department of Computer Engineering, KPU, Siheung-si, Gyeonggi-do, Korea
Han-Soo Kang, Hyu-Jeong Kim
Foretek Co., Ltd., Seonjin Bldg., #35-11, Samsung-dong, Gannam-gu, Seoul, Korea
Keywords: Hand functions, Handgrip strength, Rehabilitation.
Abstract: The primary purpose of this study was to analyze quantitatively the degree of injury and/or the progress of
treatment for physical impairment. This study provided a more detailed study that evaluates all test
parameters including maximum grip strength, duration of operation, average grip strength, acceleration
work, dynamic endurance time and percent change in static endurance. In addition, a complete database
management system is developed and used to store related training, evaluation, and personal information.
Designed device in this paper developed a grip sensor using loadcell transducer (≤60kg). The system will
be efficient to operate and convenient to use, furthermore, it can be helped for understanding and analysis
the progress of a patient during a doctor’s rehabilitation program.
1 INTRODUCTION
The functions of hand are one of the important parts
of our body that performs a lot of function in our
lives. Therefore, hand injury including slight and
acute injury such as distortion, bruise, fracture,
occupational injuries, and amputations can seriously
affect our life. To recovery from these injuries,
latent risk due to the patient’s detail information
should be considered prior to the treatment to set a
plan and goal of following treatment.
In addition, studies on hand function have
reported that aging also affect hand function and
reduce an amount of muscles. According to
(Mathiowetz, Kashmand and Volland, 1985),
reliable and valid evaluation of hand strength is of
importance in measuring hand function and
evaluating patient’s ability to return to employment.
(Gallery and Foster, 1985) presented that injured or
diseased hand decreases its muscular strength and
therefore it should be recovered rapidly.
Furthermore, measurement of muscular strength
prior to treatment is necessary procedure of
evaluating states of patient, especially, when it is
damaged by neurological disease, musculoskeletal
system disorder or other factors. In addition, hand
grip strength is used to diagnose the symptom of
rheumatoid arthritis, chronic fatigue syndrome,
developmental disabilities, muscular dystrophy and
pakinson’s disease (Innes, 1999; Andria,
Attivissimo, Giaquinto & Sasanelli, 2006). (Bassey
and Harries, 1993) reported a 2% loss of grip
strength per year for men and women older than 65
years old. As described, studies on handgrip strength
have been studied in various fields. To measure
handgrip strength, various facilities and equipment
have been developed for each purpose. Those
include analog and digital types of equipment.
Generally, digital type is preferred in order to get an
accurate result. Due to this importance and
requirement, generally, JAMAR’s digital hand
dynamometer is widely known and used to measure
handgrip strength. However, functions of this system
are only able to display real time variation and
maximum value of handgrip strength. Thus, there
has been a limitation of evaluating complex hand
function only using the values from the existing
system.
In this paper, we have developed software that is
able to evaluate and analyze the quantitative degree
of injury, disorder, etc. We have also developed grip
155
Ryu W., Ahn S., Kang S., Chung S., Kang H. and Kim H. (2010).
DESIGN OF A HAND DYNAMOMETER FOR TESTING AND ANALYSIS OF HAND FUNCTIONS.
In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Biomedical Electronics and Devices, pages 155-158
DOI: 10.5220/0002589801550158
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