3D printed endoskeleton with a soft skin for upper-limb body actuated prosthesis

The development of upper limb prostheses had a great growth with the proliferation of additive manufacturing technologies. This article suggests the design and development of a novel Bio-inspired compliant finger which is composed of a 3D printed rigid endoskeleton covered by soft matter, to apply to body actuated upper limb prostheses. We demonstrate the design and implementation of this finger and show how such finger can improve the hands functionality substantially. The hand performance is evaluated against a comprehensive grasp list that contains 33 grasps that humans perform in daily tasks. While the previous version of the body-actuated hand could perform only 5 of these 33 grasps, the updated version of the hand with soft fingers could perform 23 grasps.