Four BME senior project members won a Top Design Award at the at the 38th Annual Northeast Bioengineering Conference (NEBEC) hosted by Temple University in Philadelphia. The four students are: Erik Anderson, Joe Moloughney, Konstantin Ozerinsky, and Ralph Saleh. Their project was entitled “Body Powered Anthropomorphic Prosthetic Hand with Force Feedback and Auto-Rotation Regimes.” This project was one of the top 3 senior design projects at NEBEC.
This senior project team proposed a prosthetic hand design which is a potential low-cost alternative to currently available prosthetic hands. Currently available prosthetic hand devices suffer from lack of voluntary wrist movement or are prohibitively expensive. The proposed prosthetic hand incorporates a body powered shoulder harness for generating grip force and adds a motor housed in the wrist for axial rotation of the wrist, which can be manually controlled by pressure switches worn on the user’s toes. Additionally, a
microcontroller uses infrared signals emitted from the wrist to auto-rotate the palm towards the nearest detected object when this mode is turned on. The proposed design represents a considerable advantage in terms of functionality and cost over available commercial models.
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