Bionic Hand with Phalanx Built-In Servos

Abstract

Losing one or both hands is a devastating experience, as the human hand is used for numerous activities, such as eating, working or conveying emotions. Thus, restoring a lost limb is a rather important goal, to give back a crucial functionality to a person who was lost. Currently, most academic papers use a muscle-like approach to achieve such an object, while commercially available solutions to restore one’s limb are done by embedded motors and controllers. In this paper, we focus on creating a prosthetic hand, as close to biomimicry as possible, by embedding a DC motor, a controller, and a series of gears into each phalanx of the hand, which could be used as a prosthetic hand close to biomimicry. This is achieved with inexpensive and readily available components and technologies such as 3D printing, keeping the device’s costs to a minimum. With said device, we hope to discover the reason why institutes prefer one approach to another.