Conceptual Method of Temperature Sensation in Bionic Hand by Extraordinary Perceptual Phenomenon.

Lack of temperature sensation of myoelectric prosthetic hand limits the daily activities of amputees. To this end, a non-invasive temperature sensation method is proposed to train amputees to sense temperature with psychophysical sensory substitution. In this study, 22 healthy participants took part besides 5 amputee participants. The duration time of the study was 31 days with five test steps according to the Leitner technique. An adjustable temperature mug and a Peltier were used to change the temperature of the water/phantom digits to induce temperature to participants. Also, to isolate the surroundings and show colors, a Virtual Reality (VR) glass was employed. The statistical results conducted are based on the response of participants with questionnaire method. Using Chi-square tests, it is concluded that participants answer the experiment significantly correctly using the Leitner technique (P value < 0.05). Also, by applying the "Repeated Measures ANOVA", it is noticed that the time of numbness felt by participants had significant (P value < 0.001) difference. Participants could remember lowest and highest temperatures significantly better than other temperatures (P value < 0.001); furthermore, the well-trained amputee participant practically using the prosthesis with 72.58% could identify object's temperature with only once time experimenting the color temperature.

Hybrid control combined with a voluntary biosignal to control a prosthetic hand.

In this research, the combination of fuzzy/PD and EMG signals, as direct command control, is proposed. Although fuzzy/PD strategy was used to control force position of the artificial hand, the combination of that with EMG signaling to voluntary direct command control is a novel method. In this paper, the EMG signal and its role in effective communication between a DC motor with a voltage trigger and neurofeedback are initially explained. Moreover, by introducing a filtration method, EMG pulses are obtained as stepping pulses with a signal-specific height of a voltage between 0 and 6 V, according to EMG domain voltage, with a time interval adapted from the EMG stimulus pulses. Two data points from each channel of EMG were extracted. The domain of the voltage of the EMG signal is impacted on the output of the fuzzy logic unit, and also the time amount between each stimulus of the EMG signal is the input of the PD controller. By this method, a user can influence grip position and grasping force of his/her prosthesis.