Materials and Costs

The proposed hands can be fabricated using off-the-shelf, low-cost materials. All required materials can be easily found in hardware stores around the world. For our design we use Plexiglas (acrylic) as the main material, but any other plastic like ABS can also be used.

Prosthetic hand actuated with surface EMG electrodes.

It is evident that the majority of the cost corresponds to the servo motor. Cheaper motors can also be used without compromising the efficiency of the proposed design. This observation led us to explore also alternative solutions for actuation. We focused on providing a fully motor-less system.

In particular, we have already developed a design that makes use of a custom-made body-powered, tendon driven actuation/transmission system (that can be built with ABS filament), drastically reducing the total cost of the system.

Body-Powered prosthetic hand

Body-Powered Actuation Mechanism

Necessary Tools and Materials for Creating a Prosthetic Hand

A list of necessary tools and materials for creating a prosthetic hand can be found here.

Fingers Assembly Guide

An assembly guide for the prosthetic fingers can be found here.

Hand Assembly Guide

An assembly guide for the prosthetic fingers can be found here.

A Complete Guide for the Replication of our Prosthetic Hands

The prosthetic hands assembly guide can be found here.

A Video Guide on How to Make Robot and Prosthetic Fingers

This is a video tutorial on how to create the fingers of the robotic and prosthetic hands of the OpenBionics initiative.