A Design of Anthropomorphic Hand based on Human Finger Anatomy

Abstract

In the past decade, multiple anthropomorphic prosthetic hands have been developed to replace the role of human hands. Prostheses should not only replace the functions of human hands in functionality but also replicate human hands in appearance and sense of bodybelonging intuitively. Human fingers have very delicate and complex structures, and it is these complex structures that make our hands dexterity. This study proposes a design based on the anatomical characteristics of the human hand. The proposed design replicates human fingers from bones, ligaments, extensor hoods, and extensor mechanism of tendon, intended to develop a prosthesis that has the same flexibility and appearance as human hand. To evaluate the performance of the proposed prosthetic in daily life, we conducted grasping experiments on common objects. It is successfully proved that the proposed design helps to improve the grasping performance of the artificial hand and has a natural appearance. In this paper, our design succeeds to improve the grasping performance of the artificial hand and gain natural appearance.

A Design of Biomimetic Prosthetic Hand

“…The tendons pass through a tunneled tube called a tendon sheath to prevent the tendons from floating due to finger motion. Previous works [10][11][12][13][14] used rubber hood or crocheting nylon to emulate the geometry and functionality of the tendon sheath as closely as possible. However, it was not durable and could not be used for a long time.…”

“…Wilkinson et al, proposed an anatomical robotic hand by replicating the bone structures of the fingers, which is the first robotic hand based on human-hand anatomy [10]. For many years, there has been much effort devoted to the designing and building of anthropomorphic robotic hands [10][11][12][13][14]. They molded cadaver bones and mimicked their joint structures by encapsulating viscous materials with a ligament-like structure.…”