A novel hybrid closed-loop control approach for dexterous prosthetic hand based on myoelectric control and electrical stimulation

Purpose - The purpose of this study is to present a novel hybrid closed-loop control method together with its performance validation for the dexterous prosthetic hand. Design/methodology/approach - The hybrid closed-loop control is composed of a high-level closed-loop control with the user in the closed loop and a low-level closed-loop control for the direct robot motion control. The authors construct the high-level control loop by using electromyography (EMG)-based human motion intent decoding and electrical stimulation (ES)-based sensory feedback. The human motion intent is decoded by a finite state machine, which can achieve both the patterned motion control and the proportional force control. The sensory feedback is in the form of transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) with spatial-frequency modulation. To suppress the TENS interfering noise, the authors propose biphasic TENS to concentrate the stimulation current and the variable step-size least mean square adaptive filter to cancel the noise. Eight subjects participated in the validation experiments, induding pattern selection and egg grasping tasks, to investigate the feasibility of the hybrid closed-loop control in clinical use. Findings - The proposed noise cancellation method largely reduces the ES noise artifacts in the EMG electrodes by 18.5 dB on average. Compared with the open-loop control, the proposed hybrid closed-loop control method significantly improves both the pattern selection efficiency and the egg grasping success rate, both in blind operating scenarios (improved by 1.86 s, p < 0.001, and 63.7 per cent, p < 0.001) or in common operating scenarios (improved by 0.49 s, p = 0.008, and 41.3 per cent, p < 0.001). Practical implications - The proposed hybrid closed-loop control method can be implemented on a prosthetic hand to improve the operation efficiency and accuracy for fragile objects such as eggs. Originality/value - The primary contribution is the proposal of the hybrid closed-loop control, the spatial-frequency modulation method for the sensory feedback and the noise cancellation method for the integrating of the myoelectric control and the ES-based sensory feedback.