Towards restoring natural touch for active prosthesis users: a Hands-on approach

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The human sense of touch is incredibly valuable for our ability to explore and interact with our environment. While the basis for the touch receptors are among the earliest findings in the evolutionary record, it has since developed into a complex multimodal interaction that informs almost everything we do [1]. The medium of touch is an explorative, communicative, and supportive tool, that is invaluable to our healthy development and well-being [2,3], with the hand being one of the major players in the sensory system [4]. Roughly one hundred thousand nerves of at least twenty varieties innervate each hand [5] which, by providing tactile feedback to the brain, allows us to grasp complex geometries, manipulate small objects in the hand or even find a light switch in a dark room. However, there exists a large portion of the population who lack the ability to do this: it is estimated that there are currently upwards of three million amputees living in the European Union, with forty thousand new upper limb amputations per annum [6]. It has been shown that this has a massive negative impact on quality-of-life and mental health of the individual [7]. Most commercial prosthetics available to these people lack a comprehensive feedback mechanism that could supply the user with the information that able-bodied persons take for granted. Ironically, even, the drive towards active prosthetics has reduced the amount of tactile information able to be conveyed to the user, when compared to their Bowden-cable counterparts [8]. This trade-off has allowed for more advanced autonomy and control, but often leads to issues with user acceptance [9,10] and reduced performance in grasping tasks due, in part, to this lack of sensory feedback [11]. Thus, natural, informative tactile feedback would be a hugely beneficial addition to upper-limb prosthetic devices. As such the research proposed for this project will aim to answer the following question: "What are the design constraints of an integrated tactile feedback mechanism for upper limb prosthetics to enable grasping, fine manipulation and user acceptance?"