Biomechanical analysis of subjective pinching effort based on tendon-skeletal model.

In this paper, the influence of the finger posture on the subjective effort during pinching motion is investigated by using a tendon-skeletal finger model. The experimental results show that the subjective effort human feels is affected by the size of the object he/she pinches, and the subjective effort correlates with the finger length. The simulation results show that the pattern of the tendon forces is similar to that of the EMG activity measured in the experiment, and the positive correlation was observed between the finger length and the object size where the summation of the tendon forces becomes the minimum.