Upper extremity prosthetics: Current status, challenges and future directions

Abstract

There is a drastic increment of the demand for prosthetic devices over the last few decades. This is caused by the increased amputees because of casualties due to civil wars, injuries due to accidents, etc. Therefore, the robotic prostheses are one of the highly interested research areas in recent robotic research. The target is to make sure the amputee gets a better chance to interact with the real world, in spite of the amputation he has. The paper presents the results of a comprehensive literature analysis towards a development of an upper-limb prosthetic arm. This study identifies the methods of prosthetic classification as the segment of application, number of degrees of freedom (DoF), types of applied actuators, types of power transmission methods and control methods. In this study, the upper extremity prosthetic devices are classified based on the segment of application. Thus, they can be mainly classified into shoulder prosthetics, transhumeral and elbow prosthetics, transradial and hand prosthetics. This study considers all the above categories of recent upper extremity prosthetics, and reviews their key technologies by taking state-of-the-art robots as examples