Multigrasp myoelectric control for a transradial prosthesis

This paper presents the design and preliminary experimental verification of a multigrasp myoelectric controller. The controller enables the direct and proportional control of a multigrasp transradial prosthesis through a set of nine postures using two surface EMG electrodes. Five healthy subjects utilized the multigrasp controller to manipulate a virtual prosthesis to experimentally quantify the performance of the controller in terms of real time performance metrics. For comparison, the performance of the native hand was also characterized using a dataglove. The average overall transition times for the multigrasp myoelectric controller and the native hand with the dataglove were found to be 1.49 and 0.81 seconds, respectively. The transition rates for both were found to be the same (99.2%).