Title: Development of gripping mechanism for a prosthetic hand

Authors: Sagar V. Ganorkar; Santosh B. Jaju

Addresses: Department of Mechanical Engineering, G.H. Raisoni College of Engineering, Digdoh Hills, Hingna Road, Nagpur, India ' Department of Mechanical Engineering, G.H. Raisoni College of Engineering, Digdoh Hills, Hingna Road, Nagpur, India

Abstract: Prosthetic hand is an artificial device which replaces human hand lost due to trauma or congenital. Prosthetic hand should be simple for a person with amputations to use and should contribute to their performance in grasping task. The prosthetic hands usually consist of a finger like and thumb like member to grip an object. A number of mechanisms are developed to provide the gripping like adaptive grasp system, cross four bar mechanism, six axis Southampton mechanism one way lock, variable force transmission mechanism, and six bar chain mechanism. The disadvantages of the present prosthetic hands are high weight of hand, backlash in the joint, poor function, noise, and less cosmetic appearance. To overcome the above disadvantages a new mechanism is introduced in which each finger compromises a number of spring and thread system. The springs act as a structure and joint for the finger.

Keywords: prosthetic hands; gripping mechanism; prosthetics; prosthetic structure; spring and thread systems; springs; threads; finger joints; bioengineering; biomedical engineering.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCAET.2014.058000

International Journal of Computer Aided Engineering and Technology, 2014 Vol.6 No.1, pp.1 - 13

Published online: 17 Jun 2014 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article