A Wearable Testbed for Studying Variable Transmission in Body-Powered Prosthetic Gripping.

For those with upper limb absence, body-powered prostheses continue to be popular for many activities despite being an old technology; these devices can provide both inherent haptic feedback and mechanical robustness. Yet, they can also result in strain and fatigue. Body-powered prosthetic graspers typically consist of a simple lever providing a relatively constant transmission ratio between the input forces from the user's shoulder harness and the grip force of their prosthetic prehensor. In the field of robotic hand design, new continuously varying transmissions demonstrate particular promise in generating a wide range of grasping speeds without sacrificing grip strength. These benefits, if applied to shoulder-driven prosthetic grippers, have the potential to both reduce shoulder exertion and fatigue. This work presents the integration of a continuously variable transmission into a body-powered, voluntary close prosthetic testbed. We introduce the design and validate its performance in a benchtop experiment. We compare constant transmission conditions with a force-dependent, continually varying condition. The device is mounted on a prosthetic emulator for a preliminary wearable demonstration.

Trajectory Control-An Effective Strategy for Controlling Multi-DOF Upper Limb Prosthetic Devices.

Despite great innovations in upper-extremity prosthetic hardware in recent decades, controlling a multiple joint upper limb prosthesis such as an elbow/wrist/hand system is still an open clinical challenge, in large part due to an insufficient number of control inputs available to users. While simultaneous control is in its early stages, the common control approach is sequential control, in which joints and grasps are driven one at a time. In this paper, we introduce and evaluate a concept we call trajectory control, that builds upon this approach, in which motions of the wrist, elbow, and shoulder DOFs (and subsets of them) are coupled into predefined sets of coordinated trajectories; to be selected by the user and driven with a single input variable. These trajectories were designed based on an earlier motion study of activities of daily life obtained from human demonstrations. We experimentally evaluate the efficacy of our approach through a human subjects study in which tasks are performed in a virtual environment. The results show that as device complexity increased (i.e. greater number of DOFs corresponding to more proximal amputations), participants were able to complete tasks faster with trajectory control while exhibiting similar levels of body compensation when compared to sequential and simultaneous control. Additionally, participants found trajectory control to be more intuitive and displayed more natural movement.

Effect of Number of Digits on Human Precision Manipulation Workspaces.

Precision manipulation, or moving small objects held in the fingertips, is likely the most heavily utilized class of dexterous within-hand manipulation and adds greatly to the capabilities of the human hand. This article focuses on studying the effects of varying the number of digits used on the resulting manipulation abilities, in terms of translational workspaces and rotational ranges, by manipulating two circular objects, 50 mm and 80 mm in diameter. In general, as the number of digits in contact with the object increases, the results show a significant reduction in precision manipulation workspace range for four of the six translation and rotation directions and no significant change in the other two, suggesting that for these particular metrics, more fingers result in a reduction in performance. Furthermore, while two digits results in the largest workspaces for five of the six translation and rotation axes, the lack of ability to control rotation in the distal-proximal direction suggests that three digits may be more desirable for overall precision manipulation dexterity.

Dimensionality Reduction and Motion Clustering During Activities of Daily Living: Decoupling Hand Location and Orientation.

This article is the second in a two-part series analyzing human arm and hand motion during a wide range of unstructured tasks. In this work, we track the hand of healthy individuals as they perform a variety of activities of daily living (ADLs) in three ways decoupled from hand orientation: end-point locations of the hand trajectory, whole path trajectories of the hand, and straight-line paths generated using start and end points of the hand. These data are examined by a clustering procedure to reduce the wide range of hand use to a smaller representative set. Hand orientations are subsequently analyzed for the end-point location clustering results and subsets of orientations are identified in three reference frames: global, torso, and forearm. Data driven methods that are used include dynamic time warping (DTW), DTW barycenter averaging (DBA), and agglomerative hierarchical clustering with Ward's linkage. Analysis of the end-point locations, path trajectory, and straight-line path trajectory identified 5, 5, and 7 ADL task categories, respectively, while hand orientation analysis identified up to 4 subsets of orientations for each task location, discretized and classified to the facets of a rhombicuboctahedron. Together these provide insight into our hand usage in daily life and inform an implementation in prosthetic or robotic devices using sequential control.

Dimensionality Reduction and Motion Clustering During Activities of Daily Living: Three-, Four-, and Seven-Degree-of-Freedom Arm Movements.

This paper is the first in a two-part series analyzing human arm and hand motion during a wide range of unstructured tasks. The wide variety of motions performed by the human arm during daily tasks makes it desirable to find representative subsets to reduce the dimensionality of these movements for a variety of applications, including the design and control of robotic and prosthetic devices. This paper presents a novel method and the results of an extensive human subjects study to obtain representative arm joint angle trajectories that span naturalistic motions during Activities of Daily Living (ADLs). In particular, we seek to identify sets of useful motion trajectories of the upper limb that are functions of a single variable, allowing, for instance, an entire prosthetic or robotic arm to be controlled with a single input from a user, along with a means to select between motions for different tasks. Data driven approaches are used to discover clusters and representative motion averages for the wrist 3 degree of freedom (DOF), elbow-wrist 4 DOF, and full-arm 7 DOF motions. The proposed method makes use of well-known techniques such as dynamic time warping (DTW) to obtain a divergence measure between motion segments, Ward's distance criterion to build hierarchical trees, and functional principal component analysis (fPCA) to evaluate cluster variability. The emerging clusters associate various recorded motions into primarily hand start and end location for the full-arm system, motion direction for the wrist-only system, and an intermediate between the two qualities for the elbow-wrist system.

Behavioral correlates of semi-zygodactyly in Ospreys (Pandion haliaetus) based on analysis of internet images.

Ospreys are renowned for their fishing abilities, which have largely been attributed to their specialized talon morphology and semi-zygodactyly-the ability to rotate the fourth toe to accompany the first toe in opposition of toes II and III. Anecdotal observations indicate that zygodactyly in Ospreys is associated with prey capture, although to our knowledge this has not been rigorously tested. As a first pass toward understanding the functional significance of semi-zygodactyly in Ospreys, we scoured the internet for images of Osprey feet in a variety of circumstances. From these we cross-tabulated the number of times each of three toe configurations (anisodactylous, zygodactylous, and an intermediate condition between these) was associated with different grasping scenarios (e.g., grasping prey or perched), contact conditions (e.g., fish, other objects, or substrate), object sizes (relative to foot size), and grasping behaviors (e.g., using one or both feet). Our analysis confirms an association between zygodactyly and grasping behavior; the odds that an osprey exhibited zygodactyly while grasping objects in flight were 5.7 times greater than whilst perched. Furthermore, the odds of zygodactyly during single-foot grasps were 4.1 times greater when pictured grasping fish compared to other objects. These results suggest a functional association between predatory behavior and zygodactyly and has implications for the selective role of predatory performance in the evolution of zygodactyly more generally.

Rotational ranges of human precision manipulation when grasping objects with two to five digits.

The ability to move and manipulate objects within the hand is important for the overall performance of the human hand. Such movements are key for many tasks, including writing, using precision tools, turning knobs, and operating various haptic interfaces. In this work we analyze the ability of 17 unimpaired subjects to rotate objects 50 and 80 mm in diameter using 2 to 5 digits, while maintaining the initial finger-object contact locations. Subjects were asked to rotate the object with a particular number of fingers around one of three orthogonal hand axes for 30 seconds and explore their rotational range. The average rotational range achieved over all conditions was 47 degrees, with the largest rotation of 82 degrees for the 3 digit case around a distal-proximal axis. The rotations around the palmar-dorsal and the ulnar-radial axes showed similar trends, where the smaller object resulted in 1.3 and 1.2 times larger rotation workspaces than the larger object (p <; 0.001), respectively. The rotation around the distal-proximal axis has a different trend, where the difference in rotation amplitude between different number of finger conditions is over 50% (p <; 0.003), but the difference in object size conditions is only 10%. The results highlight that the orientation of the rotation axis has significant influence on the rotation capabilities of the human hand. In designing handheld tools and haptic devices one should carefully consider around which axes a rotation is required.