Design Guidelines for Sensor Locations on 3D Printed Prosthetic Hands

Recently, the advent of 3D printers has enabled people to produce a lot of inexpensive and obtainable prosthetics. In addition to that, various sensors have also been developed and used to give intelligent functions to the prosthetics. However, there may be cases where the number of sensors attached to the prosthetics should be limited due to cost, limited space, or power issues as the number of sensors increase. Therefore, in this paper, we provide a design guideline that could be used to determine the ideal sensor locations, particularly when the number of sensors is limited by finding out the locations of the high contact areas where the prosthetic hand touches the object. To this end, we experiment with a popular prosthetic hand made using a 3D printer. The prosthetic hand with gloves is used to touch two different objects that are covered with black ink, and the area of ink transferred onto the gloves is measured by image processing. Experiments are conducted ten times on the same object to obtain statistical results, and as a result, we show the most contact areas with the objects and present the guidelines.

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