Abstract:
Although significant technological advances have been made in the last forty years, natural and effortless control of upper limb prostheses is still an open issue. Commer...Show MoreMetadata
Abstract:
Although significant technological advances have been made in the last forty years, natural and effortless control of upper limb prostheses is still an open issue. Commercially available myoelectric prostheses present limited Degrees of Freedom (DoF) mainly because of the lack of available and reliable independent control signals from the human body. Thus, despite the crucial role that an actuated wrist could play in a transradial prosthesis in terms of avoiding compensatory movements, commercial hand prostheses present only manually adjustable passive wrists or actuated rotators controlled by (unnatural) sequential control strategies. In the present study we investigated the synergies between the humeral orientation with respect to the trunk and the forearm pronation/supination angles during the execution of a wide range of activities of daily living, in healthy subjects. Our results showed consistent postural synergies between the two selected body segments for almost the totality of the activities of daily living under investigation. This is a promising result because these postural synergies could be exploited to automatically control the wrist rotator unit in transradial prostheses improving the fluency and the dexterity of the amputee.
Published in: 2015 37th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC)
Date of Conference: 25-29 August 2015
Date Added to IEEE Xplore: 05 November 2015
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PubMed ID: 26736792