Abstract: The mimic of aesthetics, function, and rehabilitation application makes the prosthetic hand design an interdisciplinary, synthetic work. Prosthetic hands should be designed in a comprehensive consideration with a synthetic framework from multiple areas. In this case, a synthetic framework containing 12 anthropomorphism indexes is established and utilized to understand the human hand characteristic and quantifiably evaluate the anthropomorphism of a prosthetic hand. Our quantified evaluation results show that a Global Anthropomorphic Score (GAS) of the current commercial prosthetic hands is only 45.2%. The compliance, coupling speed ratio and configuration of the Degrees Of Freedom (DOF) are found to be the lowest three anthropomorphism evaluation indexes in all 12 indexes. In addition, a design priority is proposed based on the quantified evaluation results and contributes to a prosthetic hand design. Moreover, our correlation analysis results between each index and GAS show that, compared with the conventional evaluation index-grasp gesture, the rotation axis distribution index has a stronger distinguishing capability to the hand performance. Finally, a flowchart of prosthetic hand design was presented for a designer to design a prosthetic hand with a high anthropomorphism.

Key words: bionic design, anthropomorphism, quantified evaluation, mechanical implementation, prosthetic hand, rehabilitation