Design, implementation and performance validation of UOMPro artificial hand: Towards affordable hand prostheses.

In this paper, an anthropometric, active artificial prosthetic hand named UOMPro (University of Moratuwa Prosthetic) is proposed. The UOMPro hand is realized during research on developing affordable hand prostheses for use by people mainly in developing countries where purchasing high cost state-of-the-art commercial hand prostheses may be beyond their capacity. The proposed hand is developed with an affordable cost (<; 850 USD) and it consists of 6 Degrees of Freedom (DOF) including flexion/extension motions of five fingers and abduction/adduction motion of the thumb finger. Under actuated fingers are fabricated using a combination of 3D printed parts and CNC machined aluminum which addresses drawbacks in fully 3D printed hands. All components of the electronic control circuit which are responsible for low-level controlling of the hand are placed inside the hand where a simple serial communication interface is provided to link with high-level control methods. The implemented low-level controller can communicate with either a high-level controller that sends individual fingers position commands or a high-level controller which sends hand grip pattern commands. A set of experiments are conducted to validate the performance of the overall system and results are presented with potential future directions.