Development of hand model and sensor placements for measuring thumb motion

Abstract

The hands play an important part in our daily life as it is capable of producing actions that are deemed too sophisticated for robots to perform. There are many motion capture devices available in the market which aims to achieve a better understanding of the hands’ motion. However, the cost of such device can be very expensive. A cheaper alternative device known as the SmartGlove has been developed. However, it is only capable of measuring flexion/extension of the hand and not the entire hand motion. In addition, the associated software to display the captured hand motion is limited to flexion/extension only. The aims of this project are to further develop a hand model that includes abduction/adduction of the thumb and to investigate the feasibility of using Optical Linear Encoder (OLE) to detect and measure the abduction/adduction (TMCabd) of the thumb.