The Hydraulic WILMER Tweezer: Design and Development of a Hydraulic Voluntary Closing Mechanism within a Body Powered Split-Hook Prosthesis

Background Despite its high demand, prostheses are too often abandoned because they fail to meet the main requirements control, comfort and cosmesis. Body-powered hook prostheses provide good control due to their proprioceptive feedback but are in general not efficient nor appealing. The WILMER group has developed an appealing voluntary-opening...

Workspace Extension in Shoulder Elevation/-Protraction Actuated, By-Wire Controlled Grasping and Squeezing in a Virtual Environment

Many users of body-powered upper extremity prostheses experience difficulties using their device and a large group abandons usage altogether. Shoulder control via Bowden cable is widely used because of the intuitive use and low cost, but requires large shoulder movements and high operating forces that, according to literature, often exceed the...

Design of a flat dynamic hand orthosis finger for DMD patients

People with Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) will suffer from a limited hand function. Therefore, a dynamic hand orthosis could be one of the solutions to improve their hand function and quality of life. However, at this moment, none of the obtainable hand orthoses fits their special needs. The goal of this research is to design a flat dynamic...

A classification and performance comparison of force-generators for application in exoskeletons and robotic manipulators

In Chapter 1, the focus is on the classification of force generators, which is the family of mechanisms to which balancers belong to. The goal of this chapter is to introduce a bottom-up classification method to identify the complete solutions space of transmissions in force generators based on their transfer function. Using this method, spring...

Design, Fabrication, and Evaluation of a 3D printable locking mechanism for 3D printed transradial hand prosthesis suitable for developing countries

The design of an active, under-actuated, prosthetic wrist mechanism based on synergetic relations

Inspired by work of Montagnani et al. (2015), who found that for prosthetic hands a complex wrist mechanism worked functionally equal to a multi-DOF hand mechanism, new work has been set in motion to extrapolate and test this hypothesis. The goal of this work consisted of building a multi-DOF wrist mechanism, while it was crucial to keep the...

Ergonomic Exoskeleton Synthesis: Application to a Wearable Passive Exoskeleton for the Shoulder

The human machine-interface is more important than ever in the field of exoskeletons. Current design approaches lack a way of systematically designing the ergonomics of exoskeletons. Methods with a more pro active approach to ergonomics have to be developed. This thesis extends existing methods by which self aligning mechanisms are created with...

A biomechanical characterization of spinal motion data for the design of a compliant scoliosis brace

<br/>Adolescent Idiopathic Scoliosis (AIS) is a condition of the spine, often characterized by a three- dimensional spinal deformity. Treatment usually involves interventions like exercise, bracing, or if necessary, surgery. Often bracing is prescribed to stop curve progression so that surgery can be avoided. Traditional scoliosis braces are...

Multiple degrees of freedom wrist prostheses: Design of an electrically powered two DoF wrist prosthesis

Current wrist prostheses offer limited functionality regarding degrees of freedom and range of motion. A new two degrees of freedom wrist mechanism was designed and based on this concept a prototype was build and tested. Testing included generated torque measurements, externally applied torques, weight and size measurements. The prototype has a...