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WHAT IF WE HAD MORE THAN 5 FINGERS ON EACH OF OUR HANDS?

Extra fingers wouldn't be superfluous

Opening an envelope or a jar sounds pretty common and not really challenging for people with two functioning hands.

However, for those who without full wrist and hand function, these tasks can be difficult. Fortunately for everyone, MIT has engineered a new kind of wrist robot prosthesis. “It is well-known that the motion of the human hand is controlled by synergy — which is the idea that groups of muscles are activated together by a single control signal. We want to extend the synergy-based control to wearable robots,” said MIT doctoral candidate Faye Wu in a video about her presentation this week at Robotics: Science and Systems 2014.

At some point, we could need a hand or two for accomplishing a lot of tasks. A robotic addition might be the solution! They are creating a synergistic algorithms which could help out the robotic extension to follow along the way all the other fingers cooperate to gasp something. The device measures position of the wearer’s fingers by using data from the sensors attached to the human hand.

For the moment, the extra robotic fingers are called “Supernumerary Robotic Fingers“

7 finger robot

Details

  • 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139, United States
  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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