Development of a Multi-Function Myoelectric Prosthetic Hand with Communicative Hand Gestures

In daily life, another major role of human hand is a communicative function using hand gestures besides grasp function. Therefore, if amputees can express their intention by the prosthetic hand, they can much actively participate in social activities. Thus, this paper propose myoelectric multi-function prosthetic hand which can express 6 useful hand gestures such as Rock, Scissors, Paper, Indexing, Ok and Thumb-up. It was designed as under-actuated structure to minimize volume and weight of the prosthetic hand. Moreover, in order to effectively control various hand gestures by only two EMG sensors, we propose a control strategy that the signal type are expanded as "Strong" and "Light", and hand gestures are hierarchically classified for the intuitive control. Finally, we prove the validity of the developed prosthetic hand with the experiment.