Project description
An affordable, easy-to-use bionic hand for upper-limb amputees
An estimated 3 million people worldwide need upper-limb prostheses, and more than 100 000 new amputations are performed annually. However, prosthetics are expensive and need to be replaced every few years. What is more, most do not offer users a high range of motion and flexibility, and few users can afford the more technologically advanced ones which are also difficult to control. The EU-funded Adams Hand project proposes an innovative myoelectric prosthetic hand that can move all fingers with one motor, making them automatically adapt to the shape and size of grasped objects. The solution is based on a pioneering mechanism that allows for real hand-like behaviour. In addition, it is lighter and more compact than current prosthetics, is less noisy, has higher autonomy, and is more affordable.
Objective
Globally there are an estimated 3 million people that are in need of arm prosthetics. Standard prosthetics are expensive, and
they need to be replaced every 3 to 5 years, making it a burden on those who need it. Standard prosthetics also do not give
users the range of motion and freedom need to be most useful to them. Only a small proportion of amputees can afford high
tech protheses. Adam’s Hand (A Dialogic, Adaptive, Modular, Sensitive Hand) is an innovative myoelectric hand prosthesis
based on a revolutionary mechanism – patented in Italy, patent-pending in EU, USA, China, India - that moves all fingers
with just one motor (instead of the state-of-the-art 5-6 motors poli-articulated devices), making it extremely easy to control.
Adam’s Hand provides a fuller range of motion and control for users, acting more like a living hand, also being lighter, more
compact, less loud and presenting higher autonomy. The number of people who will require an amputation will double by
2050. Having a device that allows you to have a functioning limb will allow people to have more freedom in their everyday
lives. Adam’s Hand’s innovation represents a growing trend in the mechatronic research field, allowing for the design of
robust, lightweight and easy-to-control end-effectors and in high-resistance 3D printing that allows for the fast production of
tailor-made and highly-customizable prosthetic devices. This gives us a SOM of €300 million. People with disabilities make
an enormous contribution to European society, but often face barriers that prevent them from participating in society on an
equal basis with others. At BionIT Labs, our mission is to improve the quality of life for people with disabilities by creating
innovative and affordable technology that can “Turn their disabilities into New Possibilities”, allowing users to operate with
ease in any environment.
Fields of science
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
SME-1 - SME instrument phase 1Coordinator
73010 SOLETO
Italy
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.