In the last few years, the number of projects studying the human hand from the robotic point of view has increased rapidly, due to the growing interest in academic and industrial applications. Nevertheless, the complexity of the human hand given its large number of degrees of freedom (DoF) within a significantly reduced space requires an exhaustive analysis, before proposing any applications. The aim of this paper is to provide a complete summary of the kinematic and dynamic characteristics of the human hand as a preliminary step towards the development of hand devices such as prosthetic/robotic hands and exoskeletons imitating the human hand shape and functionality. A collection of data and constraints relevant to hand movements is presented, and the direct and inverse kinematics are solved for all the fingers as well as the dynamics; anthropometric data and dynamics equations allow performing simulations to understand the behavior of the finger.

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The total time of Extravehicular Activity (EVA) performed by astronauts has increased significantly during the past few years. On the other hand, the bulk and stiffness of the suit itself and in particular of the gloves generate some difficulties for the astronauts to perform their tasks in space. Therefore, it is necessary to improve the EVA glove technology for future needs. Since a lack of categorized information for those who want to improve EVA gloves is evident, in this work a survey on related literature has been carried out and fundamental data has been categorized. The paper starts with an overview on the historical and chronological progress of EVA suits and EVA gloves followed by a review of the previously demonstrated EVA gloves including American and Russian ones. The remaining part of the paper is dedicated to the characteristics of current EVA gloves and to present and future trends in research for further improvements.