Evaluation of User-Prosthesis-Interfaces for sEMG-Based Multifunctional Prosthetic Hands

• Published in: Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Vol. 21; no. 21; p. 7088
• Main Authors: Fajardo, Julio, Maldonado, Guillermo, Cardona, Diego, Ferman, Victor, Rohmer, Eric
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland MDPI AG 26-10-2021; MDPI
• Subjects: Activities of Daily Living; Amputation; Amputees; Artificial Limbs; assistive robotics; Bionics; Electromyography; Hand; Humans; Interfaces; Methods; Pattern recognition; Prostheses; Prosthesis Design; Radio frequency identification; Robotics; Sensors; upper-limb prosthesis; user-prosthesis interface; Workloads; assistive robotics; upper-limb prosthesis; electromyography; user-prosthesis interface
• ISSN: 1424-8220; 1424-8220
• DOI: 10.3390/s21217088

The complexity of the user interfaces and the operating modes present in numerous assistive devices, such as intelligent prostheses, influence patients to shed them from their daily living activities. A methodology to evaluate how diverse aspects impact the workload evoked when using an upper-limb bionic prosthesis for unilateral transradial amputees is proposed and thus able to determine how user-friendly an interface is. The evaluation process consists of adapting the same 3D-printed terminal device to the different user-prosthesis-interface schemes to facilitate running the tests and avoid any possible bias. Moreover, a study comparing the results gathered by both limb-impaired and healthy subjects was carried out to contrast the subjective opinions of both types of volunteers and determines if their reactions have a significant discrepancy, as done in several other studies.