Data driven prosthetic
What makes us humans? Is it our society or feeling of belonging to a group? Is it something Psychological or Biological? What makes us us is the brain and its computational power. But, there is one more important organ which has helped us since the beginning of time, even when we did not use our brain that much, it is our hand thumb. Thumb is the core part of our hand and each and every physical task done by humans, somehow thumb is involved in it. “A good technology seems easy to use and it vanishes in the background such that it becomes core part of human life” like electricity and internet. In same way, our thumb is one of the best technological gift given to us by nature.
So what happens when we loose a thumb, It is said that human looses 40% of its efficiency when a thumb has been amputated. Fundamentally, human looses the Dexterity that separates us from the other animals. Thumb is very dexterous and it is compact. That is why producing working prosthetic of thumb is difficult and costly. Current models which are proposed in the market are passive which means they are just cosmetic restoration made up of plastic or polymer. Although myoelectrical arms are there which consists of attaching sensors to skin to collect signal and use that to control hand, no considerable attempts are made in applying same principle just to create working model of thumb. Other method includes passive prosthetic which is nothing but silicon based thumb with no functionality and control system. Last option is pollicization, in which surgeon takes index finger and attach it in place of thumb.
Now a days, due to computational advancements and availability of cheap sensors, many processes has become data driven ie somehow data is collected from the customer or consumer and use that for betterment of the product. Also machine learning and AI can also be used for making a better predicting model. So, one day, After thinking lot of thumb prosthetic , it hit us we decided to make a data driven active prosthetic model of the thumb which user can control.
To make it data driven, requirement was of-course “Data”, After reading several paper and observing human hand , we decided to use angular data from index finger and thumb of able human and use those for control the prosthetic. For that a data glove was made with sensors which are used to measure tilt in all three axis. Then we used stored that data using micro-controller and software in the computer.
By this collected data, we created small clusters of output position(thumb data). Then we created prototype of thumb model in which servos are embedded in it so that it can be actuated. Then we use the clusters to create small objects which are provided to the micro-controller. In short, the orientation of index finger will be input and it will call the object accordingly and the servo angles are provided according to objects.
In this what we wanted to achieve is that to show that we can use data from different body parts and that can be used to control a prosthetic. And the good part is that, all the components cost less that the silicon based thumb. So we can say that it is possible to use analytics in prosthetic as well. In future, we might have a completely controllable limb because of sophisticated data acquiring system and machine learning.