Trajectory Control-An Effective Strategy for Controlling Multi-DOF Upper Limb Prosthetic Devices

Despite great innovations in upper-extremity prosthetic hardware in recent decades, controlling a multiple joint upper limb prosthesis such as an elbow/wrist/hand system is still an open clinical challenge, in large part due to an insufficient number of control inputs available to users. While simul...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on neural systems and rehabilitation engineering 2022, Vol.30, p.420-430
Main Authors: Gloumakov, Yuri, Bimbo, Joao, Dollar, Aaron M.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Artificial Limbs
Elbow
Elbow (anatomy)
Hand
Human motion
Humans
Movement
Performance evaluation
Prostheses
Prosthesis control
Prosthetics
Protocols
Sequential control
Shoulder
Task analysis
Trajectory
Trajectory control
Upper Extremity
upper limb
Virtual environments
Wrist
Wrist Joint - surgery
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Summary:Despite great innovations in upper-extremity prosthetic hardware in recent decades, controlling a multiple joint upper limb prosthesis such as an elbow/wrist/hand system is still an open clinical challenge, in large part due to an insufficient number of control inputs available to users. While simultaneous control is in its early stages, the common control approach is sequential control, in which joints and grasps are driven one at a time. In this paper, we introduce and evaluate a concept we call trajectory control , that builds upon this approach, in which motions of the wrist, elbow, and shoulder DOFs (and subsets of them) are coupled into predefined sets of coordinated trajectories; to be selected by the user and driven with a single input variable. These trajectories were designed based on an earlier motion study of activities of daily life obtained from human demonstrations. We experimentally evaluate the efficacy of our approach through a human subjects study in which tasks are performed in a virtual environment. The results show that as device complexity increased (i.e. greater number of DOFs corresponding to more proximal amputations), participants were able to complete tasks faster with trajectory control while exhibiting similar levels of body compensation when compared to sequential and simultaneous control. Additionally, participants found trajectory control to be more intuitive and displayed more natural movement.
ISSN:1534-4320
1558-0210
DOI:10.1109/TNSRE.2022.3151055