Seoul National University and Neofect sign technology transfer agreement

On November 20th, 2020, Biorobotics Laboratory, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Seoul National University (Professor Kyu-Jin Cho) and Neofect sign technology transfer agreement for technologies related to tendon-driven mechanisms and soft wearable hand robot. The technology transfer agreement includes three patents and a know-how.
Professor Kyu-Jin Cho has been developing soft wearable hand robots for the people with lost hand mobility using tendon-driven mechanism since 2009. In 2015, professor Cho had shown his first wearable hand robot called Exo-Glove, which is tendon-driven fabric based soft wearable hand robot. Based on experience on development of Exo-Glove, professor Cho also have developed Exo-Glove Poly and Exo-Glove Poly II, which are tendon-driven polymer-based soft wearable hand robots. While developing various tendon-driven soft wearable hand robot, he also focused on developing tendon-driven mechanisms and actuator systems for tendon-driven robots. Recently, professor Cho is expanding his researches from the development of soft wearable robots to collaboration researches related to design optimization, sensor-embedded systems and artificial intelligence.
NEOFECT Co., Ltd. is a company from Korea engaged in developing rehabilitation products and services. The company has developed various smart rehabilitation robots to help patients such as stroke at home and hospitals. The company first started with launching a rehabilitation solution for stroke patients called RAPAEL Smart Glove. Currently, the company has expanded the product lines including RAPAEL Smart Kids, RAPAEL Smart Board, RAPAEL SMART PEGBOARD, RAPAEL Cognition, NeoMano, and RAPAEL Suite.
From 2016 to 2018, Professor Kyu-Jin Cho and Neofect have performed joint government project from National Rehabilitation Center to develop a tendon-driven polymer-based soft wearable hand robot. In 2017, Neofect joined Soft Robotic Research Center, Seoul National University as a participating company for three years. From these relationship, in 2020, Seoul National University and Neofect signed technology transfer agreement for development and improvement of soft wearable hand robots.