REALISTIC DESIGN CONSIDERATIONS OF A 3-DOF PROSTHETIC WRIST DEVICE

Abstract

This work discusses the hardware implementation details of a three degree of freedom prosthetic wrist device. To address some issues in current state of the art wrist design, we employ a hybrid mechanism architecture, consisting of a serial and parallel mechanism. This requires a combined view of both theoretical and practical physical considerations when designing such a device. We discuss kinematic analysis of the device, simulation methods and metrics that lead to informative physical implementation details, and actual physical implementations of the prosthetic wrist device. We show that these implementation characteristics can make different physical designs with the same nominal kinematics more suitable for different types of amputees.