Literature review on needs of upper limb prosthesis users

Abstract

The loss of one hand can significantly affect the level of autonomy and the capability of performing daily living, working and social activities. The current prosthetic solutions contribute in a poor way to overcome these problems due to limitations in the interfaces adopted for controlling the prosthesis and to the lack of force or tactile feedback, thus limiting hand grasp capabilities. This paper presents a literature review on needs analysis of upper limb prosthesis users, and points out the main critical aspects of the current prosthetic solutions, in terms of users satisfaction and activities of daily living they would like to perform with the prosthetic device. The ultimate goal is to provide design inputs in the prosthetic field and, contemporary, increase user satisfaction rates and reduce device abandonment. A list of requirements for upper limb prostheses is proposed, grounded on the performed analysis on user needs. It wants to (i) provide guidelines for improving the level of acceptability and usefulness of the prosthesis, by accounting for hand functional and technical aspects; (ii) propose a control architecture of PNS-based prosthetic systems able to satisfy the analyzed user wishes; (iii) provide hints for improving the quality of the methods (e.g., questionnaires) adopted for understanding the user satisfaction with their prostheses.