Control strategy for a myoelectric hand: measuring acceptable time delay in human intention discrimination

In order to enhance controllability of a myoelectric hand, we focus on a gap between the time when a human intends to move a myoelectric hand and the time when the hand actually moves (i.e., time delay). Normally, the myoelectric hand users dislike the time delay because it makes them feel uncomfortable. However, the users learn the time delay within some time ranges and, eventually, get feel comfortable to operate the hand. Thus, we assume, if we reveal the acceptable delay time (i.e., the time the users accept the gap with their learning ability), we can provide more time in a human intention discrimination process, and enhance its success rate. Therefore, we developed a mobile myoelectric hand system with an embedded linux computer, and conducted a ball catch experiment: we investigate the acceptable delay time by adding the delay time (i.e., 120[ms], 170[ms], 220[ms], 270[ms], 320[ms]) into the human intention discrimination process. As a result, we confirmed that the max accept delay time was approximately 170 [ms] that achieves 61% success rate.