Development of the Myoelectric Hand with a 2 DOF Auto Wrist Module

An essential consideration to differentiate prosthetic hand from robot hand is its convenience and usefulness rather than high resolution or multi-function of the robot hand. Therefore, this study proposes a myoelectric hand with a 2 DOF auto wrist module which has 6 essential functions of the human hand such as open, grasp, pronation, supination, extension, flexion, which improves the convenience of the daily life. It consists of the 3 main parts, the myoelectric sensor for input signal without additional attachment to operate the prosthetic hand, hand mechanism with high-torqued auto-transmission mechanism and self-locking module which guarantee the safety under the abrupt emergency and minimum power consumption, and dual threshold based controller to make easy for adopting the multi-DOF myoelectric hand. We prove the validity of the proposed system with experimental results.