A scalable shear and normal force sensor for prosthetic sensing

Current techniques of stress measurement to assess comfort for prosthetic limbs focus on resolving different forces as well as the directions for each force. The sophistication introduced by spatially scaling these techniques for the entire interface with the difficulty of integration in the current prosthetic limbs call for a more intelligent design. In this work, we introduce the design and experimental results of a capacitive shear and normal force sensor. Our force sensor works with a single transduction point to ease the process of spatial scaling and is integrated seamlessly on the liner component of the prosthetic limb. We provide proof-of-concept results of both shear and normal force sensing with our capacitive force sensor.