Brief Presentation

The objective of the SafeHand project is to develop a cybernetic prosthesis, which must mimic as much as possible the sensory-motor capabilities of the human hand. The SafeHand prosthetic hand will be concentrated on the engineering issues of the cybernetic hand development. In particular, SafeHand project will focus its activities on:

• the design and development of a new biomechatronic prosthetic hand exploiting sinergically mechanics, sensing, electronics and control engineering;
• the study of innovative control strategies for identifying the user's intentions and for controlling the desired prehension patterns;
• the design, development, and testing of the electronic units for conditioning the efferent bio-signals and generating the afferent signals;
• safety issues in design and development of the prosthetic hand in order to provide an acceptable and usable hand to amputees community.

The SafeHand project will be integrated within an ongoing clinical framework aimed at testing experimentally a new cybernetic hand prosthesis that will:

• be felt by an amputee as the lost natural limb delivering a natural sensory feedback by means of the stimulation of some specific afferent nerves;
• be controlled in a natural way by processing the efferent neural signals coming from the central nervous system (reducing the discomfort of the current EMG-based control prosthesis).