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A low-cost system to control prehension force of a custom-made myoelectric hand prosthesis

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Abstract

Purpose

In order to achieve stable and dexterous grasping of objects, prehension force control is quite a significant parameter for prosthetic hands. Commercially available hands such as bebionic, i-limb quantum and Michelangelo offer the precise grasping capability to perform activities of daily living (ADLs). However, the cost of such hands is too expensive for amputees residing in low-income countries.

Methods

This paper introduces a low-cost, simple and efficient system for controlling the prehension force of a self-designed myoelectric prosthetic hand. A hand prototype was developed employing 3D printing technology and an intrinsic actuation approach. The hand fingers were equipped with a pre-calibrated force sensor for the online estimation of the grasp force. A closed-loop proportional-derivative (PD) based position control system was designed considering actuator as plant, electromyography (EMG) as a reference and grasp force as a feedback signal.

Results

The results showed highly improved parameters, i.e. overshoot, offset and settling time of the proposed system than a simple open-loop system. These parameters guarantee faster closing of hand fingers and the production of accurate prehension force during finger-object interaction.

Conclusion

Further, the myoelectric hand with a developed control scheme was successfully tested on five different transradial amputees for performing precise and faster grasping of different shaped objects.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Design Innovation Centre, Indian Institute of Technology (BHU) for funding this project.

Funding

This research work was funded by Design Innovation Centre, Indian Institute of Technology (BHU).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Biomedical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology (BHU), Varanasi, 221005, India

    Alok Prakash & Shiru Sharma

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  1. Alok Prakash
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  2. Shiru Sharma
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Correspondence to Alok Prakash.

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Conflict of interest

The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest.

Ethical approval (involvement of animals)

This article does not contain any studies with animals performed by any of the authors.

Ethical approval (involvement of human subjects)

This article involves surface EMG data acquisition from various human subjects. Ethical approval was taken from the Ethical Committee, Institute of Medical Sciences, BHU, Varanasi, before performing this experiment. All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Prakash, A., Sharma, S. A low-cost system to control prehension force of a custom-made myoelectric hand prosthesis. Res. Biomed. Eng. 36, 237–247 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42600-020-00064-w

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42600-020-00064-w

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