Development of a Clinically Viable Multifunctional Hand Prosthesis

1.0 INTRODUCTION We have developed a new multifunctional hand mechanism in the hopes of providing a new mechanism that will have superior function over today’s single degree-of-freedom (DOF) mechanisms and yet be robust enough to be clinically viable. There have been a multitude of multifunctional hands built, all of which have failed to find clinical application as an artificial hand replacement. Bolstered by advancements in motor and robotic technology, the past two decades has seen significant effort, and money invested in the development of externally-powered multi-functional hand systems [4, 7,8,9,10,11]. However while many of today’s commercially available externally-powered systems owe their origins to modern upper-limb research, save for the Touch Bionics hand [14], no multifunctional hand mechanisms have made the transition from the Laboratory into clinical practice.