An assistive device to help individuals with quadriplegia (C5-C7) improve their grasping abilities has been developed by engineers at UC Berkeley. Dubbed the Dorsal Grasper, it leverages voluntary wrist extension and uses robotic fingers on the back of the hand to facilitate human-robot collaborative grasping.
Their findings, recently published in IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering, demonstrated for the first time how the Dorsal Grasper can expand users’ graspable workspace. Test subjects found that they could easily grasp objects anywhere within their arm’s reach, without having to rotate their bodies, which can cause wheelchair users to lose their balance.
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Leave a Reply