Design and Evaluation of Miniaturized Solenoid Actuators for Providing Sensory Feedback for Upper Limb Amputee

Inhalt:
Losing a hand or arm can dramatically degrade life quality of an amputee. Although the development of advanced prosthesis has made significant progress, the prosthesis abandon rate is reported high (30% and 50%). One of the major reasons for prosthesis abandonment is the lack of sensory feedback. Providing sensory feedback can not only increase the functionality of the prostheses, but also introduce a body ownership feeling to the amputees. In current work, a miniaturized solenoid device was designed and integrated in the prosthetic socket for providing grasping force feedback for upper limb amputees. The sensory feedback system was tested with one amputee subject and proved to be useful for deformability detection and objective manipulation.