The Design of an Upper-Limb Prosthetic Finger Using Algorithms for Full Customization

Abstract

Prosthetics, a useful assistive device for patients having suffered trauma, are characterized by extreme customization, adaptability, and complex design. One of the basic principles of having a good prosthetic is an optimized design. With traditional CAD software, what a designer selects will be automatically used and applied to a solid model. However, CAD is not yet advanced enough to provide biomedical designers with a reliable customization framework. An aim of our work was to develop an upper-limb finger prosthetic device framework. The authors used an open-source software environment to develop an editable bespoke finger prosthetic. The implementation was done in the OpenSCAD programming language. The result is a rendering of a fully customizable finger prosthetic. The code base can be altered to generate new designs. The main contribution of the work is the script that provides an interface for prosthetic personalization. Such an approach may provide easy to use tools for orthotic and prosthetic technicians.