Ultrasound Based Prosthetic Arm Control

The loss of an upper limb can have a substantial impact on a person's quality of life since it limits a person's ability to work, interact, and perform daily duties independently. Artificial limbs are used in prosthetics to help people who have lost limbs enhance their function and quality of life. Despite significant breakthroughs in prosthetic technology, rejection rates for complex prosthetic devices remain high[1]-[5]. A quarter to a third of upper-limb amputees abandon their prosthetics due to a lack of comprehension of the technology. The most extensively used method for monitoring muscle activity and regulating the prosthetic arm, surface electromyography (sEMG), has significant drawbacks, including a low signal-to-noise ratio and poor amplitude resolution[6]-[8].Unlike myoelectric control systems, which use electrical muscle activation to calculate end-effector velocity, our strategy employs ultrasound to directly monitor mechanical muscle deformation and then uses the extracted signals to proportionally control end-effector location. This investigation made use of four separate hand motions performed by three physically healthy volunteers. A virtual robotic hand simulation was created using ROS. After witnessing performance comparable to that of a hand with very less training, we concluded that our control method is reliable and natural.