Organizing and Prioritizing User Needs for Upper Limb Prostheses

Upper limb amputation leads to severe restrictions in daily activities and psychosocial difficulties, which can dramatically reduce the quality of life of affected people. Despite the significant scientific and engineering effort in building advanced robotic prostheses, their abandonment rates suggest a discrepancy between user needs and device performance. To address this gap, we present an initial step in identifying, harmonizing, and prioritizing the needs of people with limb loss. Using the PRISMA methodology, we analysed 73 papers on the topic. Using a bottom-up approach, we clustered the needs identified in different surveys into categories and macro-categories based on a taxonomy derived from the terms identified in the literature. We then prioritized the needs after a normalization of the major surveys. We believe that this work will provide both a high-level and low-level understanding of the needs of people with limb loss, thereby helping to guide the design of more user-friendly prostheses. In the future, combining these results with the definition of technical specifications will enable the identification of needs that can be satisfied through personalized design, particularly considering recent advances in manufacturing processes.