Multipurpose Prosthetic With Arduino

grabcad

May 11: Thank you GrabCad and Stratasys for recognizing my project --------------------Throughout their daily lives, amputees have trouble performing various tasks that we simply overlook or take for granted. Activities such as operating a computer can become difficult when losing the ability to use an arm. The objective of my project is to help amputees by creating task specific interchangeable prosthetic attachments. Last year my teammate, Sohan, and I had created a makeshift prosthetic by cutting the bottom of a plastic water bottle to simulate a body powered prosthetic. We created a 3D printed adapter which attached a quick disconnect drill chuck onto the bottle cap. This allowed us to create attachments that would have hex bits connected to them in different ways. By extending their arm, the amputee would be able to disconnect and reconnect attachments with ease using a common body powered mechanism(Quick Disconnect Prosthetic).This year I wanted to incorporate electronics into the project in order to add more capabilities to the attachments. I used a Myoware myoelectric muscle sensor and attached it to an Arduino to detect when the user flexed their muscle. I then programmed the Arduino with a threshold value which would trigger different functions depending on the output of the Myoware muscle sensor. I started by designing a mouse attachment in Tinkercad that would trigger the left mouse button with a small servo motor when the user flexed their arm. Participants (5 classmates) reported an average of 70% of their clicks registering to the computer. Through testing, I discovered that the success rates of the Myoware differed for each person. While person C was able to use the attachment without trouble, person D had trouble even clicking once. The project was partially successful, but the consistency of the attachments needs to be higher to meet the criteria. Although still in the prototyping phase, the myoelectric mouse attachment was still able to complete its job. Many participants stated that at some point during testing they had trouble with the Myoware muscle sensor. In the future, I plan to adjust the gain values and play with the sensor so that the data output is accurate.I found that I could use the same servo and code to create other attachments such as a Chopstick Holder and a Drill Holder, and since the same Arduino code is used, users do not have to upload code each time they switch between these 3 attachments.For the Extreme Redesign Challenge I will be submitting my Chopstick Holder as it is the only one of the 3 attachments that meets the size requirements of the challenge.Below are some mp4 videos demonstrating the attachments.