The purpose of this case study was to introduce a myoelectric hand prosthesis for upper extremity amputee and prosthetic training program. Limb loss can result from disease, injury, or congenital causes. Trauma has been increasingly important role as the cause of amputaion in young, vigorous, and otherwise healthy individuals. The higher the level of amputation the greater the functional loss of the part, and the more the amputee must depend on the prostheis for fuction and cosmesis. Myoelectrical control of prostheses is a recent development and has been steadily gaining in clinical use over the past 20 years. Such a prosthesis uses signals from muscle contraction within the stump to activate a battery driven moter that operates specific component fuctions of the prosthesis. This twenty years old male case was operated a right above-elbow amputation due to tracffic accident and admitted to Yonsei Rehabilitaion hospital for the preprosthetic and prosthetic training. The case was able to successfully complete his myoelectric hand prosthesis training in the February of 1995.

Surface electromyogram (sEMG), which is a bio-electrical signal originated from action potentials of nerves and muscle fibers activated by motor neurons, has been widely used for recognizing motion intention of robotic prosthesis for amputees because it enables a device to be operated intuitively by users without any artificial and additional work. In this paper, we propose a training-free unsupervised sEMG pattern recognition algorithm. It is useful for the gesture recognition for the amputees from whom we cannot achieve motion labels for the previous supervised pattern recognition algorithms. Using the proposed algorithm, we can classify the sEMG signals for gesture recognition and the calculated threshold probability value can be used as a sensitivity parameter for pattern registration. The proposed algorithm was verified by a case study of a patient with partial-hand amputation.

This paper proposes a method to simultaneously estimate two degrees of freedom in wrist forces (extension - flexion, adduction - abduction) and one degree of freedom in grasping forces using Electromyography (EMG) signals of the forearms. To correlate the EMG signals with the forces, we applied a multi - layer perceptron(MLP), which is a machine learning method, and used the characteristics of the muscles constituting the forearm to generate learning data. Through the experiments, the similarity between the MLP target value and the estimated value was investigated by applying the coefficient of determination (R2) and root mean square error (RMSE) to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. As a result, the R2values with respect to the wrist flexionextension, adduction - abduction and grasping forces were 0.79, 0.73 and 0.78 and RMSE were 0.12, 0.17, 0.13 respectively.

This paper presents an anthropomorphic finger prosthesis for amputees whose proximal phalanx is mutilated. The finger prosthesis to be proposed is able to make the amputees to perform the natural motion such as flexion/extension as well as self-adaptive grasping motion as if normal human finger does. The mechanism of finger prosthesis with three degrees-of-freedom (DOFs) consists of two five-bar and one four-bar linkages. Two passive components composed of torsional spring and mechanical stopper and only one active joint are employed in order to realize an underactuation. Each passive component is installed into the five-bar linkage. In order to activate the finger prosthesis, it is required for the user to flex and extend the remaining proximal phalanx on the metacarpophalangeal (MCP) joint, not an electric motor. Thus the finger prosthesis conducts not only the natural motion according to his/her intention but also the grasping motion through the deformation of springs by the object for human finger-like behavior. In order to reveal the operation principle of the proposed mechanism, kinematic analysis is performed for the linkage design. Finally both simulations and experiments are conducted in order to reveal the design feasibility of the proposed finger mechanism.