Health and Behavior: Robotic Prosthetics

Mentor: Erik Engeberg, Ph.D.

Student: Michael Bornstein

Home Institution: Florida Atlantic University

Over Summer 2017, Michael Bornstein worked with Dr. Erik Engeberg and his team on Robotics Prosthetics. The team is trying to develop a relatively cheap, intuitive, and robust method to control hand prosthetics. Current prosthetics for hands typically only incorporate two of the three qualities mentioned. Either cheap and intuitive with only a single degree of freedom, or intuitive and robust at a premium much more expensive than most could afford. The team’s goal is to create multiple degrees of freedom control scheme that is cheap enough for widespread availability. They are doing so by use of an electromyogram is used to detect muscle activation in a patient’s forearm, which will be converted into a signal to actuate the prosthetic. The data processing techniques they employ will hopefully be able to provide better control without the need of expensive hardware.

Click here for the PDF presentation.   Click here to watch the video presentation.