Adaptive, Tendon-Driven, Affordable Prostheses for Partial Hand Amputations: On Body-Powered and Motor Driven Implementations.

Adaptive, tendon-driven and affordable prosthetic devices have received an increased interest over the last decades. Prosthetic devices range from body-powered solutions to fully actuated systems. Despite the significant progress in the field, most existing solutions are expensive, heavy, and bulky, or they cannot be used for partial hand amputations. In this paper, we focus on the development of adaptive, tendon-driven, glove-based, affordable prostheses for partial hand amputations and we propose two compact and lightweight devices (a body powered and a motor driven version). The efficiency of the devices is experimentally validated and their performance is evaluated using two different types of tests: i) grasping tests that involve different everyday objects and ii) tests that assess the force exertion capabilities of the proposed prostheses.