Prosthetic research with Barrett Hands and WAM arms

A hand with a sense of touch it’s something that amputees and prosthetic hand researchers have been acutely aware of for a long time, but creating robotic hands with a this kind of sense isn’t trivial.

Veronica Santos, PhD in UCLA, is performing a research to advance prosthetic hands and arms and make them feel like a native limb. Santos is constructing a language of touch that a computer and a human can both understand by using SynTouch’s BioTac® sensors to explore objects of varied shapes, sizes and textures, and using BarrettHands on a pair of force-controlled WAM™ arms from Barrett Technology to control these explorations.

Meanwhile, Case Western Reserve University researcher Dustin Tyler, PhD is also working on technology to advance prosthetic hands. His research focuses on the seamless transmission of sensory data to amputees. By implanting electrodes that encircle nerves, data from sensors on prosthetic hands can be transmitted to the brain.