Designs of tailor-made myoelectric prosthetic hand for trans-metacarpal amputations with remaining fingers and joint moving functions

Abstract

This paper proposes a method for designing a socket and motorized hand as part of a myoelectric prosthetic hand (EMG prosthetic hand) for partial hand amputees with fingers remaining on the amputation stump. The proposed design method can adapt to individual amputation stumps and remaining finger functions. This method incorporates the affected angular and distance parameters into the hand kinematic model, and designs sockets by shelling the 3D solid model of amputation stumps from the expanded 3D solid model of amputation. The socket and motorized hand were integrated using 3D CAD and the output was provided to a 3D printer. We designed customized EMG prosthetic hands for two subjects with partial hand amputation and remaining fingers, and prototyped them using a 3D printer. The manipulation ability was evaluated using a pick and place experiment, and the results confirmed the validity of the proposed EMG prosthetic hand.