During the Spring of 2019, I wrote a proposal to develop a motorized prosthetic hand, in which motors are controlled by muscle activation patterns captured by EMG sensors. EMG signals are filtered and classified by an artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning algorithm into hand postures, which in turn commands the hand motors. The school liked my proposal and I was awarded the Branson's Barney-Glaser Junior Fellowship in Math. I received $1500 US dollars to work on my project during the summer. Raw data is captured by a Thalmic Labs MYO armband ring, which includes 8 EMG sensors; the Beaglebone-based controler commands the prosthetics hands from Open Bionics (ADA V1.1 and Brunel 2.0 Hands). These hands are currently discontinued and I had to change slightly the design to adjust for new linear actuators and control boards. The hands were 3D printed using a Ultimaker 2+ printer using PLA (beige), TPU-95A (white) filaments and urethane molded rubber for the palm of the Brunel Hand (blue color).

In the following links, you can find my Junior Fellowship proposal in short (500 words) and unabridged version. My motivation for this project came from my work as an e-NABLE community volunteer and my previous summer project building a robotics arm.