Dressing, feeding, writing, driving. Daily actions made possible by an extraordinary instrument: our hand.
But a wide variety of pathologies or injuries can influence the mobility and the strength of the hand, deeply deteriorating the quality of life and introducing difficulties in many basic and instrumental Activities of Daily Living.

A group of researchers of the Department of Industrial Engineering of the University of Florence, along with experts of the Don Carlo Gnocchi Foundation, strongly believes that the robotic approach can give persons new opportunities to recover the lost hand dexterity. During the recent years they built a first prototype to explore this issue.

HOLD project aims to develop an innovative Hand Exoskeleton System to enhance rehabilitation sessions outcome or completely replace the hand functionalities.

Rehabilitation is the key to recover lost functionality as much as possible. Usually it is performed in hospital, but rehabilitation periods are often shorter than necessary due to health care cost restraint.

Prolonging these treatments at home with the robotic device may be an effective solution.