Optimizing Transradial Prosthetic Hands: A Review of Functional Requirements
摘要
The hand is considered to be the most flexible and robust organ in the human body. From performing the simplest of activities such as grasping, tapping, pointing, and writing to complex activities such as playing musical instruments, and performing precise surgeries, the human hand serves to be one of the most versatile organs in the body. Transradial amputation due to severe traumatic injuries compromises a lot of factors such as physical and psychological well-being, and social integration. Transradial prosthetics are used to improve mobility and overall functionality facilitating the hand amputees to perform their activities in daily living smoothly. The main aim of the systematic review was to investigate the contribution of functional outcomes to the performance of transradial prosthetic hands. Some of the key functional outcomes to be considered while designing transradial prosthetic hands include fingertip force, grip force, degrees of freedom (DoF), and motion. A review of the literature was done using the PubMed, IEEE, Scopus, EMBASE, and Cochrane databases between 2014 and 2022. A methodical search using relevant keywords produced 1400 distinct articles. A total of 320 articles from the search results were considered based only on the title. Upon analyzing the abstracts, 307 articles were found to be excluded. The remaining 13 articles were subjected to full-text analysis. The study reported the functional outcomes of various prosthetic hands. Some of them delivered all the aforementioned functional outcomes in optimal amounts, whereas the others delivered a few among them. The study concluded that an ideal transradial prosthetic hand should be highly dexterous to handle objects of various sizes and shapes. Besides, it should have an optimum range of motion (RoM), exert the required fingertip and grip forces, and multiple DoF.