The SPRING Hand: Development of a Self-Adaptive Prosthesis for Restoring Natural Grasping

Commercially available prosthetic hands are simple grippers with one or two degrees of freedom; these pinch type devices have two rigid fingers in opposition to a rigid thumb. This paper focuses on an innovative approach for the design of a myoelectric prosthetic hand. The new prosthesis features underactuated mechanisms in order to achieve a natural grasping behavior and a good distribution of pinching forces. In this paper it is shown that underactuation allows reproducing most of the grasping behaviors of the human hand, without augmenting the mechanical and control complexity.