Design of biomimetic hand prosthesis with tendon-driven five fingers

This paper proposes a biomimetic hand prosthesis with tendon-driven five fingers. Each finger is composed of a distal-middle phalange, a proximal phalange and a metacarpal bone, which are connected to a link mechanism. The finger flexion is a resultant motion by pulling a wire to serve as a tendon, but the finger extension is performed by an elastic mechanism composed of a restoration spring. The designed hand prosthesis with tendon-driven five fingers has six degrees of freedom. But its total weight is merely 400.72g. The hand performs various hand functions such as the grasping and the hand postures. From experimental results, we show that the proposed hand prosthesis is applicable to amputees as a prosthetic hand.