Olmer Alvarado and Mulatu Bachoro
In this report, we introduce and demonstrate a cost-effective and improved biomimetic anthropomorphic hand attached to a wearable interface that can be used to study and understand the behavior of hand tremor motion caused by neurological conditions, such as Parkinson’s disease (PD), Essential Tremors (ET), as well as other motion disorders that have a negative impact on patients. The mechatronic hand model, designed by Youbionic – Italy, has six degrees of freedom (DOFs) five of which cover the fingers and thumb for flexion and extension and one for the thumb abduction and adduction. These DOFs allow the hand model to provide more realistic hand movements and tremor motion characteristics with respect to finger digits. The hand model consists of several acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) 3D printed parts and six servomotors SG90 connected to an Adafruit 16-Channel Servo Drive which is attached to an Arduino Nano Every microcontroller. The microcontroller receives the signals from the six-10 kΩ potentiometers integrated on the Exohand model – the users’ wearable interface also designed by Youbionic–which transmits the motion data to the servo drive to actuate the servomotors. Our main objective is to implement and enhance the software development of a commercially available product that can be utilized in a clinical environment to accomplish multiple functionalities, such as demonstrating hand tremor motion, collecting, and analyzing tremor data, and validating concepts for hand tremor suppression devices.
Olmer Alvarado and Mulatu Bachoro