Development of a Bio-Inspired Wrist Prosthesis

This paper presents a novel mechanical design of a 3-DOF wrist prosthesis. Mimicking biological solutions from the human arm anatomy, the wrist prosthesis is designed to have a parallel structure and is cable-driven. This results in a much lighter prosthesis, with higher loading capacity as compared to a rigid-linked, serial structured design. Based on the wrist joint capabilities, this paper focuses on the cable tension, stiffness and workspace analyses. This is to develop a comprehensive framework to optimize the wrist prosthesis design. Finally, a prototype is fabricated based on the optimization results