Human-Inspired Reflex to Autonomously Prevent Slip of Grasped Objects Rotated with a Prosthetic Hand

Abstract

Autonomously preventing grasped objects from slipping out of prosthetic hands is an important feature for limb-absent people since they cannot directly feel the grip force applied to grasped objects. Oftentimes, a satisfactory grip force in one situation will be inadequate in different situations, such as when the object is rotated or transported. Over time, people develop a grip reflex to prevent slip of grasped objects when they are rotated with respect to gravity by their natural hands. However, this reflexive trait is absent in commercially available prosthetic hands. This paper explores a human-inspired grasp reflex controller for prosthetic hands to prevent slip of objects when they are rotated. This novel human-inspired grasped object slip prevention controller is evaluated with 6 different objects in benchtop tests and by 12 able-bodied subjects during human experiments replicating realistic tasks of daily life. An analysis of variance showed highly significant improvement in the number of successfully completed cycles for both the benchtop and human tests when the slip prevention reflex was active. An object sorting task, which was designed to serve as a cognitive distraction for the human subjects while controlling the prosthetic hand, had a significant impact on many of the performance metrics. However, assistance from the novel slip prevention reflex mitigated the effects of the distraction, offering an effective method for reducing both object slip and the required cognitive load from the prosthetic hand user.