Journal of Bionic Engineering
Volume 14, Issue 4, October 2017, Pages 692-705
Diego Ferigo1, Lukas-Karim Merhi1, Brittany Pousett2, Zhen Gang Xiao1, Carlo Menon1
1. MENRVA Research Group, School of Engineering Science, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada
2. Barber Prosthetics Clinic, Vancouver, BC, Canada
Abstract Force Myography (FMG), which monitors pressure or radial deformation of a limb, has recently been proposed as a po-tential alternative for naturally controlling bionic robotic prostheses. This paper presents an exploratory case study aimed at evaluating how FMG behaves when a person with amputation uses a hand prosthetic prototype. One volunteer (transradial amputation) participated in this study, which investigated two experimental cases: static and dynamic. The static case considered forearm muscle contractions in a fixed elbow and shoulder positions whereas the dynamic case included movements of the elbow and shoulder. When considering eleven different hand grips, static data showed an accuracy over 99%, and dynamic data over 86% (within-trial analysis). The across-trial analysis, that takes into account multiple trials in the same data collection set, showed a meaningful accuracy respectively of 81% and 75% only for the reduced six grips setup. While further research is needed to increase these accuracies, the obtained results provided initial evidence that this technology could represent an in-teresting alternative that is worth exploring for controlling prosthesis.
Key words: Force Myography (FMG) Human Machine Interface (HMI) transradial amputee limb position effect regression bionic hand
Full text is available at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1672652916604353