The design of a modular voluntary opening prosthetic hand: ongoing research and preliminary results

This work presents the mechanical design of an artificial hand in order to address the need for a commercially feasible prosthetic hand.

The hand has 3 compliant fingers and a thumb attached to a reconfigurable palm. The fingers and palm are a novel design, which is based on the natural arches of the hand. The design is modular, minimizing the number of parts and reducing assembly time.

This hand and the expandable socket are designed for transradial amputees. It has 9 degrees of freedom (DOFs), 2 of them for the reconfigurable palm. The kinematics and adequate excursion for the fingers and palm are illustrated by finite element method (FEM).

The study implements the mechanical parts by using rapid prototyping to assess preliminary results.