Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Shanghai Jiao Tong University have created an inflatable prosthetic hand that could be made for a fraction of the cost of similar prosthetics.
The inflatable hand is a type of neuroprosthetic, meaning it can pick up on residual muscle signals to perform the motions the user intends to make ? such as pouring a carton of juice or zipping a suitcase.
But while limb neuroprosthetics are usually heavy, metal creations that the engineers cost at upwards of US$10,0000, the inflatable hand is light, soft and made of US$500 worth of components.
Amputees wearing the inflatable hand can perform four different grip types, ranging from pinches to cupping the palm
The innovation could one day help some of the 5 million people in the world who have had an upper-limb amputation but can't afford expensive prostheses. "There's huge potential to make this soft prosthetic very low cost, for low-income families who have suffered from amputation," said Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researcher Xuanhe Zhao.
"This is not a product yet, but the performance is already similar or superior to existing neuroprosthetics, which we're excited about."
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Along with his collaborators at MIT and Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, Zhao has co-authored a paper on the inflatable hand that appears in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering this month.
It outlines how they made the...