Passive Mechanical Skin Stretch for Multiple Degree-of-Freedom Proprioception in a Hand Prosthesis

In this paper, we present a passive linear skin stretch device that can provide proprioceptive feedback for multiple degrees of freedom (DOF) in a prosthetic hand. In a 1-DOF virtual targeting task, subjects performed as well with our device as with a vibrotactile array, and significantly better (\(p<0.05\)) than having no feedback at all. In a 3-DOF grip recognition task, subjects were able to classify six different grips with 88.0 % accuracy. Training took 6 min and the average time to classification was 5.2 s. Subjects were also able to match a set of target grip apertures with 11.1 % error on average.