Towards the implementation of natural prosthetic elbow motion using upper limb joint coordination

The control of an active prosthetic elbow is problematic for most transhumeral amputees and a functional solution providing intuitive control over active multi-joint prosthetic upper limbs is yet to be found. The method in this paper uses IMU-based upper arm kinematics to predict the elbow motion based on upper limb joint coordinations during pointing movements. A RBFN-based regression was performed to model the shoulder/elbow coordination. The prediction results indicate that such an approach is ready to be implemented on current transhumeral prostheses equipped with embedded motion sensors like IMUs. Different algorithm training methods to obtain better prediction performance are also investigated.