Design Of A Hand Prosthesis Based On Kinematics Principles

Commercially available child hand prostheses prehensms usually have one degree of freedom (DOF) and one phalanx per finger. Such mechanism does not allow adequate encirclement of objects and its low compliance leads to instability of the object in presence of external perturbations. The goal of this research px oject is to modify an existing child hand prosthesis prehensor by adding an extra phalanx to each of the fingers. This new design should increase the munber of possible grasps, their robustness and their compliance. The kinematics and dexterity of the mechanism, along with the static stability of the grasps are the selected design cliteria. The objective is to design an actuating mechanism while respecting the reduced space available in the case of child prostheses.