António Miguel Lopes Bernardino, Electrical and Computer Engineering studen at NOVA’s Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia, created a robotic hand prosthesis and a high versatility and low cost EMG system to contribute to the patients’ rehabilitation.
The project followed Antonio’s dissertation ”A Self-Learning Approach on Haptic Guided Grasping Behaviours” and was based on two areas:
. The first area deals with the creation of a robotic hand that could give a good performance at a reduced cost. This robotic hand is designed in order to achieve moving each of the joints independently with the approximate size and weight of the human hand and made with inexpensive materials, so that the price of the system could be as low as possible.The model was obtained by printing on the 3D plotter available at the Laboratory of Design and Innovation of FCT/NOVA’s Library, partner of the American Corner.
. The second area included the improvement of the system to enable the control of the robotic hand using body muscles normally not associated with the control of the human hand through training and adaptive algorithms. This feature has great importance in a situation where you cannot make the EMG signal acquisition to the forearm level, due to factors such as upper limb malformation or transradial amputation.
published 5.November.2015