Medical Robotics Magazine

About Me

Medical Robotics Magazine is the world's first and only commercial feature news magazine devoted to all aspect of the medical robotics industry- including robotic surgery, physical therapy robots, hospital orderlies, and other topics related to robotic medicine. As a feature magazine, Medical Robotics features interviews, business news, conference coverage and editorials, as well as a generous portion of articles written by noteworthy robotics surgeons as well as clinical trials reports. MR has been on-line since 2007, and first appeared in print in January of 2008 at the annual meeting of MIRA (the Minimally Invasive Robotics Association) in Rome, Italy. Medical Robotics Magazine is copyrighted, features a nascent Board of Editorial Advisors, and is indexed by the U.S. Library of Congress. All contents (c) 2011 John J. Otrompke, JD Contact: John J. Otrompke, JD John_Otrompke@yahoo.com 646-730-0179

Thursday, September 13, 2012

Medical Robotics Magazine Presents a Discussion of
Research Concerning Improvements in Prosthetic Hands

A presentation at last year’s EU Robotics Week aimed to promote discussion of an important use of medical robotics: prosthetic hands.

While there are at least three poly-articulated prosthetic hands on the market, researchers need to make several improvements to provide relief to amputation patients, according to Emanuele Gruppioni, M.Eng., organizer of the session at EU Robotics Week 2011, ‘New generation prosthetic hands: the poly-articultated hand and its relative training,’ in Bologna on November 28.

“We are working to improve the reliability, the power, the noise and the speed, but these kind of hands also have problems with the gloves, which break much too quickly,” explained Gruppioni, a master engineer in the research and training center at the INAIL Prostheses Center, Italy’s public workers’ compensation authority. “We also need to make the mechanisms much smaller; it's necessary to place a motor with its gearbox into the space of a phalanx,” she added.

Gruppioni and colleagues are currently testing three different hands in about 10 human patients. The hands are the iLimb (Touch Bionics, Edinburgh), beBionic (RSL Steeper, Leeds, U.K.), and the Michelangelo (Otto Bock, Duderstadt, Germany). However, the researchers hope to have enrolled 20 or more patients in the research by the end of 2012, added Gruppioni, who noted that the agency is cooperating with the University of Bologna.

Medical Robotics Magazine is proud to present Gruppioni’s article on her ongoing research, below.