One of biggest problems with a contemporary spacesuit is that its fingers like to point straight out once the suit is pressurized. Astronauts tend to do a lot of hand-strengthening exercises to combat this problem but, even for the strongest astronauts, long spacewalks can leave an astronaut's hands feeling very sore. During the construction of the International Space Station, some astronauts lost their fingernails after space construction, or had them removed proactively before the mission.

Various solutions have been proposed over many years of research, but the problem has often seemed intractable. Now General Motors says that they've come up with something that seems promising for working both in space and here on Earth.

GM and NASA jointly announced yesterday that they have developed a robotic glove for both auto workers and astronauts that reduces the effort to close a glove by as much as two-thirds. GM hopes that the glove will reduce repetitive stress injuries for workers who need to hold a grip for long periods of time. The glove carries possible applications in a wide variety of industries. If the project succeeds, astronauts will do high fives, because a longstanding barrier to large-scale space construction will have been solved with something that has the potential to be an off-the-shelf solution.

There's a video available after the jump.