Haptic feedback in upper limb prostheses: Development and evaluation of a pneumatic haptic device providing feedback for upper limb prostheses

Background Upper limb prostheses help people with an upper limb deficiency in performing activities of daily living. They can be divided into two categories; body-powered and externally powered prostheses. The advantage of body-powered prostheses is that they provide feedback to the user. The advantage of externally powered prostheses is the low...

Development and evaluation of the Hybrid Hand, a prosthetic hand with force assist

Active hand prostheses aid people, who suffer from an upper limb deficiency, in performing activities of daily living. The two types of active hand prostheses available are the myo-electric prosthesis and body-powered prosthesis. Even though both allow a user to grasp objects, the downsides are major. The high actuation...

The design of a fully 3D printed easy-to-assemble and highly functional body-powered hand prosthesis for low-resource countries

Background: The majority of the amputated population is living in low-resource countries, but only a small minority has access to rehabilitating services. The accessibility of upper limb prostheses in these countries is poor due to limited technical and medical resources. 3D printing is regarded as a promising manufacturing alternative in...

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...

Creating a Miniature Hydraulic System to Power the Delft Cylinder Hand

To reduce the necessary input force of the user to exert a precision grip force above 30 N, the hydraulic circuit of the Delft Cylinder Hand can be expanded. This added hydraulic circuit has to be able to generate high enough pressures and volume flows to generate a pinch force of 30 N with all of the fingers, close the hand within 0.5 seconds...

Design of a 4-DoF hydraulic prosthetic arm for people with a shoulder amputation

People with a shoulder amputation are very much dependent on active total arm prostheses to provide in their self-care and to perform basic daily activities. Research on the development of active upper limb prosthetics has been growing over the past couple of years. The state-of-the-art total prosthetic arms that have been developed are very...

Increased Pinch Force of Body Powered Prosthetic Hand with Pneumatic Force Servo

In the Netherlands, there are around 3750 patients suffering from an upper limb deficiency. Many different prosthetic hands have been designed to give these people the function of their hand back. Of the people who own such a prosthetic hand, about forty percent does not wear their hand and about half of the wearers does not use all of the...

Cosmetic glove stiffness compensation for body-powered hand prostheses: Design of a novel negative stiffness element

The addition of a cosmetic glove to an upper limb prosthesis has an indispensable effect on the cosmetic value, but its viscoelastic behaviour adds a substantial amount of stiffness and hysteresis to the system. Consequently, the overall usability of the prosthesis is degraded. A novel negative stiffness element is designed to compensate for the...