Controlling Upper-Limb Prostheses with Body Compensations

With their advanced mechatronics, myoelectric upper-limb prostheses now have many motion possibilities. Yet, the latter are not fully employed because of the inconvenient control and prostheses wearers often use their device as a rigid tool while achieving hand positioning and orientation with compensatory movements. In this paper, we propose to take advantage of this natural human behaviour to control prosthesis motions: the user is in charge of the end-effector while the device’s role is to correct the human posture when necessary. We here apply this concept to control a prosthetic wrist pronosupination. A Rolyan clothespin test performed by two transradial amputees shows that the proposed control is as efficient as myoelectric control while requiring no learning.