ANALYZING UPPER LIMB REFLEXIVE RESPONSES FOR PROSTHETIC APPLICATIONS

Abstract

Recently, there has been an increasing interest in upper limb prosthetic hand control, but most of these studies focused on the detection of exact motion intentions. Few results have been reported on the perturbation resistance of prostheses, which is extremely important for their uses in daily life. Understanding the human upper limb reflexive mechanism would provide an efficient solution to improve the perturbation resistance of prostheses. In this study, upper limb reflexive responses to force perturbation were measured in the conditions as determined from activities of daily living. Specifically, not only muscle activities, but also joint angle changes of the reflexive responses to multi-direction, multi-site perturbation during a reaching motion were recorded and analyzed. Results showed a direction-dependency of the upper limb reflexive mechanism and the different roles of shoulder, elbow, and wrist during the responses. The results could be applied to the control system of prosthetic devices for improving their perturbation resistance.