Evaluation of prosthetic hands prehension using grasp quality measures

Abstract

Prosthetic hands have evolved and improved over the years, helping people gaining manipulation capabilities. Having a simulation tool able to obtain quantitative evaluation of the grasp capabilities of such hands could give insights as how to improve the design of hand prostheses or robotic hands by means of obtaining better quality scores. The purpose of this work is to present a framework developed to evaluate the grasp capabilities of a prosthetic hand using a selected set of grasp quality measures, and compare the results with the ones obtained for the human hand using a biomechanical model. Experiments grasping an object with different postures and varying aspects of the prosthetic hand model were performed showing the functionality of the proposed framework to evaluate the grasp quality.