Improvement of pneumatically driven prosthetic hand for use in daily life

Inhalt:
Our research group has developed a powered prosthetic hand for children using a thin McKibben-type pneumatic soft actuator and evaluated its performance through SHAP [1]. In user tests with actual pediatric upper-limb amputees, the usefulness and problems of this prosthetic hand were clarified by obtaining a sense of use that is unique to amputees. Based on these issues, we report several improvements for the practical user test in this paper. Firstly, we built a control system in the arm that allows the user to adjust the speed of finger movement. Furthermore, the pneumatic soft actuators add to suppress finger twisting and to increase grasping force during grasping movements. The addition of the actuator to the metacarpophalangeal (MCP) joint improved the grasping force, but did not suppress the twisting of the fingers.