About an Experimental Approach Used to Determine the Kinematics of the Human Finger Movement

Abstract

Nowadays the robotic or prosthetic artificial hands strive to achieve a high degree of anthropomorphism, a concept which expresses the capability of a robotic end-effector to mimic the human hand, partly or totally, as far as shape, size, consistency, and general aspect (including color, temperature, and so on). This paper proposes a new experimental approach regarding the kinematics of the human finger movement. By using video capture of a particular finger movement and dedicated video processing software we have determined the laws of variation for the main joints in the human finger. Therefore, the experimental method presented in detail in this paper is useful to corroborate the kinematic parameters (displacements, velocities and accelerations, linear or rotary) of an artificial robotic finger movement with those of the human finger movement.