A study on the forearm muscular reflexes during grasping for prosthetic applications

Recently, there has been an increasing interest in upper-limb prosthetic hand control, but most of these studies focus on the detection of exact motion intentions. Therefore, the responses to unexpected disturbance are not taken into consideration. On the other hand, unimpaired people respond to external disturbances by reflexive responses, hence, it is important to explore how this kind of reactive responses could be applied into prosthetic hand applications, and whether it will improve the human-machine interaction in a dynamical way. Our objective for the present study was to examine the responses of the human reflexes on different conditions in order to apply them to our prosthetic hand. Electromyograph (EMG) signals were recorded from the forearm muscles of unimpaired people during grasping of a cylinder. Results showed that the reflexes have different tendencies depending on the direction on which the disturbance is applied.