Designing and implementing a human hand prosthesis

Abstract

Mimicking the human body was always an important goal of science. From all its components, the hand is the most challenging, because of its complex structure and its capability of performing elaborate and useful task. The loss of the upper limb will dramatically change the life of a person, drastically reducing his or hers performances and, also very important, changing the cosmetic appearance. To cover this loss, one solution is to use a human hand prosthesis. Although there are many researchers struggling to obtain a perfect prosthesis, until nowadays there is no model to compete the natural hand. Joining to this effort, the paper presents the design and the implementation of an artificial hand prototype able to perform the prehention function. The goal was to obtain a less expensive and easy to use model, in the idea that most of the patients have a healthy hand for delicate activities. © 2009 Springer.