Designing my first prosthetic hand as a freshman student.

Abstract: The objective of this work is to develop a prosthetic hand aimed to replicate the performance, functionality, appearance, and comfort of a natural hand. The goal of the design was to develop an accessible substitution with a user-friendly interface requiring little to no training, and a high number of Degrees of Freedom. The proposed mechanical hand should be able to replicate most of the motion, and functions that a natural hand can perform like grasping a variety of objects, tactile feeling and recognition, and the manipulation of different shaped objects. This design was performed by a Mechanical Engineering Freshman student in his very first semester after performing a rigorous literature review. The design experience, trade-off, and learnings are presented in this paper to be replicated by a similar enthusiastic student.