A 25 degrees of freedom hand geometrical model for better hand attitude simulation

Numerical models are used more and more to visualize a human operator within a work environment and simulate his movements. Many models are limited in their ability to simulate complex activities like prehension and objects manipulation. The hand models proposed in the literature are relatively simple, especially assuming the palm as a rigid body, which leads to unrealistic representations of complex attitudes. The objective of the present study is to develop a more advanced hand model, able to properly simulate prehension postures. A 25 degrees of freedom (DOF) hand model has been proposed including 2 DOF for representing the palm arch. Compared to the model without palm arch, the proposed model has made significant improvement of the hand posture representation, suggesting the need of including palm arch for simulating complex hand grasping attitudes.