A tendon-driven prosthetic hand using continuum structure.

In the current research of prosthetic hands, many degrees of freedom have been omitted in order to simplify the design and reduce the weight, such as the abduction degrees of freedom of the four fingers except the thumb, which impairs the range of mobility of the prosthetic hand to some extent. This paper presents TN hand, a 3D printed, tendon-driven prosthetic hand. We use continuum structure as the finger joint. The other four fingers except the middle finger can perform flexion/extension and abduction/adduction movements, which benefits hand mobility. The design and manufacture of the fingers were elaborated and the finger stiffness was tested through experiment. Then the ability of manipulating daily objects of TN hand was verified based on hand taxonomy. In addition, there is enough range of mobility for the TN hand to perform column chords due to the ability to abduct fingers.