Robotic rehabilitation glove wins Microsoft’s 20th Imagine Cup for student inventors

Every year, I look forward to Microsoft's Imagine Cup. The seeds of future startups and potentially world-changing projects are sown by the students and young entrepreneurs who submit their extremely early stage projects to this global competition. V Bionic created a robotic glove to help patients with neurological damage recover faster at a fraction of the price of other options.

The leader of the Saudi Arabia team is a student who has been researching and inventing things for years. The rest of the crew are at the beginning of interesting careers in the industry.

People who have suffered neurological damage can use the ExoHeal glove to help with their hand movements.

Over the years, we've seen a few of these efforts come out of robotics labs and startup, the general idea is that of replicating the work of a physical therapist, who observes a patient's movements and creates a set of exercises to help restore lost limbs. It is necessary to make sure that the brain is sending the right signals after a limb injury, but it is also necessary to rehabilitate the muscles and tendons.

The team was focused on making the glove portable and affordable, other things like this can rely on pneumatic or hydraulic mechanisms, which are bulky and slow.

The image is called V Bionic.

The white structure you see in the image at the top is a 3D printed exoskeleton, while the black covering and backpack house the electronics.

Flexor linkage-driven movement gives us the flexibility to individually actuate different parts of each finger while keeping the device portable, according to Samdani.

The team found anecdotally that the glove helped patients recover more quickly, though there is a lot of work ahead for a medical device like this. They plan to target India as a high-need market first.

The Imagine Cup victory will give them a lot of money, plus a mentoring session from the CEO of Microsoft. They were told they won and it was cute.

The image is from Microsoft.

Love it.

They were not the only cool team. You can check out the final three here.