Design of a wearable device to study finger-object contact timing during prehension

A wearable device was developed to study the human grasping behavior. This device includes a custom-made glove with conductors at finger tips to detect the finger contact signals, a simple electronic circuit to enhance the signal quality, and a real-time data acquisition system to synchronize the acquisition of the finger contact signals with obtaining the optical marker signals in a motion capture system. A preliminary study shows that the new device is capable of detecting the moments of finger-object contacts with better resolution of time than the existing motion capture camera system by three orders of magnitude. This new device will be intensively used in experiments to understand human grasping.