Clinical implementation of a bionic hand controlled with kineticomyographic signals

Abstract

Sensing the proper signal could be a vital piece of the solution to the much evading attributes of prosthetic hands, such as robustness to noise, ease of connectivity, and intuitive movement. Towards this end, magnetics tags have been recently suggested as an alternative sensing mechanism to the more common EMG signals. Such sensing technology, however, is inherently invasive and hence only in simulation stages of magnet localization to date. Here, for the first time, we report on the clinical implementation of implanted magnetic tags for an amputee’s prosthetic hand from both the medical and engineering perspectives. Specifically, the proposed approach introduces a flexor–extensor tendon transfer surgical procedure to implant the tags, artificial neural networks to extract human intention directly from the implanted magnet’s magnetic fields -in short KineticoMyoGraphy (KMG) signals- rather than localizing them, and a game strategy to examine the proposed algorithms and rehabilitate the patient with his new prosthetic hand. The bionic hand’s ability is then tested following the patient’s intended gesture type and grade. The statistical results confirm the possible utility of surgically implanted magnetic tags as an accurate sensing interface for recognizing the intended gesture and degree of movement between an amputee and his bionic hand.