Adaptación de la Prótesis de Mano Basada en Soft-Robotics PrExHand para la Evaluación con Usuarios no Patológicos en Pruebas Funcionales

Abstract

It is estimated that more than one billion people in the world live with some form of disability. Within this group are those who have suffered amputation of either or both upper extremities. A way to meet the need created for this disability are hand prostheses. The function of these medical devices is replace the missing body part, which restores some functionality to the person of her body and also provides a perception of totality by regaining mobility and appearance. Most of the prostheses on the market are rigid devices which makes it difficult to efficiency and the ability to interact with the environment safely. It is because of that An option to improve prostheses is Soft-Robotics technology, since allows to imitate the movement of a human hand and provides a safer interaction with the environment in which the person is developing. The present degree work has as objective to perform an adaptation of the hand prosthesis based on Soft-Robotics PrExhand so that it can be evaluated in functional tests by non-pathological users. In these The tests seek to determine the functionality of the prosthesis and the improvements that will be made in the future. should perform. In order to meet this objective, in the first instance a literary review was carried out in order to obtain information on hand prosthesis control systems and also the types of functional tests that can be done to these devices. Once that information a control system was adapted for the prosthesis using electromyography (EMG), in order to give the user greater autonomy. In addition to this adaptation, made a coating on the fingers of the prosthesis with silicone in order to improve the grip system and also have an appearance closer to the human hand. To carry out this degree work, two protocols were created, one in order to select non-pathological users to perform functional tests and another in which raised the functional test that each user should perform, obtaining as a result, data quantitative measurements that allow the comparison of the PrExHand hand prosthesis against other prostheses under investigation and with some that are on the market and whose characteristics resemble each other. The results obtained show that the PrExHand hand prosthesis performed acceptable when performing the functional test with a control group of 4 users no pathological, the result being 2.94 on the scale of the AM-ULA test (Activities Measure for Upper Limb Amputees) .The tasks performed presented variations in a range of 0.70% up to 77.96%. Research shows that PrExHand has a smaller percentage of difference by 17.60% compared to a control group that used the SoftHand Pro prosthesis. As a result of these results, it was concluded that the hand prosthesis has an adequate performance doing activities of daily life. However, this requires improvements both in the myoelectric control system, in order to make it more sensitive to EMG signals of the user and also an improvement in the closure of the fingers of the prosthesis.