Design of a multi-degree-of-freedom virtual hand bench for myoelectrical prosthesis

Myoelectrical prosthesis is an important technique for restoring motor functions of amputee with strong direct sense, flexible control and convenient use. Recently, virtual reality has been introduced into the development of hand prostheses. In this paper, a multi-degree-of-freedom virtual hand bench was designed based on the mixed programming of Labwindows and Matlab. The bench utilized the editing tool of V-Realm Builder 2.0 to build the virtual hand model, and encoded driver program to control the action and its speed of the model by Simulink. Meanwhile, a mapping relationship was established between pattern recognition results and the virtual hand model. The virtual hand model could be controlled in real time with surface EMG signals. The present results showed that the virtual hand bench had good real-time performance that the completion time of each gesture was less than 175ms, and appropriate for test the sEMG processing scheme to control multi-degree freedom hand prosthesis. Furthermore, the system can be also used for training amputees to better adapt to prosthetic hands operation.