Soft Prosthetic Controlled Using EEG

The impact of losing a limb can be devastating to one's life. Prosthetic technologies have been upgraded from wood to different materials, non-movement to having movement more than a human arm, and from traditional prosthetic limbs made of simple wooden structure are often bulky to a highly developed structure that is starting to behave and work as a normal human part. Nowadays, with the development of materials and designs, prosthetics are made more functional, life-like, and comfortable for humans. There are many ways to help an amputee to control a prosthetic. Recently, there has been a growing interest in developing soft robot prosthetics that are more natural and intuitive to control, and using brain signals is one of the ways in which the amputee feels his prosthetic as his own and has little to no difference from the real one. The amputee can also control it instantaneously like a real limb. This study introduces a new type of prosthetic hand made of soft material (liquid silicon rubber). The design biomimics a human hand so that the prosthetic can closely resemble human flexibility and compliance. The prosthetic hand is controlled using EEG signals which are collected through a non-invasive EEG headset from the amputee’s brain. The EEG signals are decoded by a processor to find the amputee’s intentions and control the prosthetic as the amputee intended. This prosthetic improves the quality of the amputee’s life.