Vibrotactile grasping force and hand aperture feedback for myoelectric forearm prosthesis users.

Background: User feedback about grasping force and hand aperture is very important in object handling with myoelectric forearm prostheses but is lacking in current prostheses. Vibrotactile feedback increases the performance of healthy subjects in virtual grasping tasks, but no extensive validation on potential users has been performed.

Objectives: Investigate the performance of upper-limb loss subjects in grasping tasks with vibrotactile stimulation, providing hand aperture, and grasping force feedback.

Stiffness Feedback for Myoelectric Forearm Prostheses Using Vibrotactile Stimulation.

The ability to distinguish object stiffness is a very important aspect in object handling, but completely lacking in current myoelectric prostheses. In human hands both tactile and proprioceptive sensory information are required for stiffness determination. Therefore, it was investigated whether it is possible to distinguish object stiffness with vibrotactile feedback of hand opening and grasping force.

Hand-opening feedback for myoelectric forearm prostheses: performance in virtual grasping tasks influenced by different levels of distraction.

Sensory feedback and the required attentional demands are important aspects in prosthesis acceptance. In this study, hand-opening feedback is provided and the performance in a virtual grasping task is investigated. Simultaneously, a secondary task was performed to investigate the attentional demands.

Grasping force and slip feedback through vibrotactile stimulation to be used in myoelectric forearm prostheses.

User feedback about grasping force or slip of objects is lacking in current myoelectric forearm prostheses, resulting in a high number of prosthesis abandonment, because a high level of concentration is required to hold an object. Several approaches to provide force feedback to the user via vibrotactile stimulation have been described in literature, but none of them have investigated the optimal stimulation parameters. This study describes an evaluation of three modulation techniques to provide force feedback.