Host: The Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers
Name : [in Japanese]
Date : June 08, 2016 - June 11, 2016
Essential understanding of human hand dexterity is very important to make a dexterous robot hand like human hand. In this paper, we focus on the human thumb which can make the movement of opposition. The widely known musculoskeletal model of human thumb uses moment arms which were estimated from the measurements of a specimen. However, the moment arms were derived with an assumption that its joint structure can be approximated by the universal-joint model. However, universal-joint is not appropriate for modeling the real joint structure. In this paper, we evaluate a musculoskeletal model of human thumb in in daily performance which we constructed based on its real joint structure so that we can annualize muscle-skeletal activities more accurately. It is shown that the estimated muscle length with the conventional thumb model has larger error than than the one with the proposed model.
