Metrological issues concerning low cost EMG-controlled prosthetic hand

The paper deals with the realization of low-cost hand prosthesis for amputee people living in developing countries. In particular, the problems associated with the implementation of acquisition, processing and actuation blocks capable of assuring suitable performance in terms of reliability with a reduced budget have been faced and solved. To this aim, a specific architecture, based on a microcontroller PIC18F23K22 by Microchip^®, is implemented and described. Particular attention is paid on the conditioning block adopted, due to the very low amplitude signals associated with myoelectric phenomena. To this aim, a suitable calibration procedure is proposed to overcome the problems associated with the dependence of myoelectric signals with the specific amputee person.