Development of biomimetic adaptive prosthetic hand
Publication Date
July 27, 2026
Creator
Mostafa Ahmed Arafa Mohamed
Abstract
The incomparable structure of the natural human hand has for long been an inspiration for prosthetics’ developers to design and implement mechanical equivalent prostheses. The bioinspired designs primarily intend to enable amputees to achieve their activities of daily living (ADLs) and improve the acceptance rate of robotic hands, however, the complication of the designs hasn’t redeemed their pledge for improved functionality and independence. Prosthetic’s providers have been adopting anthropomorphism for commercial prosthetic designs, but the prostheses have been primarily built to function as robotic hands with limited humanoid features. In this thesis, the human hand is presented from both anatomical and biomechanical perspectives, together with a mechanical interpretation of how the biological hand works.
This work develops an anthropomorphic prosthetic hand concept that combines rigid and soft features to better reflect the natural hand. Furthermore, a single hand prosthesis can utilize different actuators of different sizes and force outputs according to the functionality of each actuator. Hexagonal Band Optimized Bellow (HexBOB) Pneumatic Artificial Muscle (PAM) was designed, modelled, optimised, and experimentally validated. The optimization process produced improved actuator designs, and clustering was used to select representative design groups. The optimized actuator also reached the targeted force output and bioinspired stiffness behaviour, which agreed well with the mathematical model.
To reduce the number of actuators needed for a highly articulated prosthetic hand, Principal Components Analysis (PCA) was used to identify key hand posture patterns from recorded hand motion data. This reduced the actuation complexity while preserving much of the hand’s natural movement. The hand motion data were captured using depth-camera system and Google Media-Pipe trained model combined through data fusion to improve reliability.
This work introduces a framework for the design philosophy of the prosthetic hand with the objective to enhance the functionality and decrease the rejection rates by improving the user capability of effectively achieving activities of daily life with high level of dexterity. The contribution is not limited to prosthetic applications, but also targets the enhancement of robotics capabilities through the incorporation of highly versatile robotic end effector with human inspired dexterity.
Item Type
ethesis
Thesis Type
PhD
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Subjects (LC)
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[Final Rev] Development of Biomimetic Adaptive Prosthetic Hand.pdf
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