Abstract

Prosthetic hand control system usually controls finger using pattern recognition from surface Electromyography (EMG) signal from the forearm, as most of the finger muscles are located in the forearm with small tendon connected to the finger skeletal. However, pattern recognition can provide only limited posture and grip motion which is different from natural musculoskeletal models of hand. Although, every finger provide contribution to daily activity, but more than half of all hand functions are made possible by the thumb and index finger. Therefore, this research will be limited to thumb and index finger to simplify the signal processing and analysis method. The proposed method used sEMG from muscles and simple movement of flexion and extension to estimate equilibrium position and stiffness with one Degree of Freedom (DOF) for each finger call musculoskeletal model. Our research interested in using the same principle of the musculoskeletal model to estimate equilibrium position and stiffness of thumb and index finger separately by measuring position in 3-dimensional space. The result will be confirmed by measuring position, force and EMG of the subject simultaneously.

Keywords:Finger angle; Finger stiffness; Musculoskeletal models; Prosthetic hand control system; Surface electromyography (sEMG)