Control of a Powered Prosthetic Hand Via a Tracked Glove 1

Although commercially available robotic prosthetic limbs now provide fingers with multiple degrees of freedom (DOFs), closely resembling the human hand, the amount of control channels provided by typical biological signals (electromyography or neural electrodes) Thus, by combining the two technologies, we developed a system to teleoperate the TouchBionics RoboLimb TM device with a custom-built 6DOF glove worn on the sound hand. The RoboLimb hand is a 6DOF prosthetic device which weighs under 500 g and can be controlled via a protocol based on the controller area network (CAN) The purpose of this system is to support on-going work in our laboratory to benefit unilateral amputees who have a sound hand with which they can teleoperate or otherwise interact with a robotic prosthetic device. Specifically, we are investigating the use of this system in (1) The performance of activities of daily living that will benefit from the mirroring of movements between the sound hand and the prosthetic device (e.g., folding a towel, moving a table, picking up a laundry basket, etc.). (2) Allow the user to pose the prosthetic hand in any desired configuration before performing a task. (3) Enable the recording of task specific grasping motions that can be defined and played back by the user in the field. Methods Tracking Glove. We have built a tracking glove using six SparkFun 2.2 00 flexion sensors (SparkFun, Inc.), a glove, an Arduino [4] Uno microcontroller, and Velcro TM to hold the Arduino device on the glove. The flexion sensors were attached to the glove through the use of custom-sewn sleeves which reduce the stress on the sensor attachment point by allowing the sensor to slide during movement. The flexion sensors were soldered to flexible multistrand wires, and the contact areas were encased in moldable thermoplastic (InstaMorph TM ) in order to prevent the soldered connections from failing during use. The resulting glove prototype is shown in The thermoplastic encased ends of the sensors were also molded into sewable buttons by a process involving laser-cut acrylic molds described in Healthy Limb Adaptor. In order to allow nonimpaired volunteers to wear and test the mirrored teleoperation of the system, a healthy limb adapter was created incorporating an Otto Bock QuickConnect ring molded onto the end of a 5 in. diameter polyvinyl chloride pipe using thermoplastic (InstaMorph T