Nowadays new types of hand prosthetic devices are able to control multiple degrees of freedom by interpreting, e.g., measured EMG signal from remaining muscles in the forearm of the amputee. But these prosthetic devices are still lacking with respect to the feedback of dynamic properties including weight, type and size of the grasped object. It is well known that such feedback can substantially improve the use of prosthetic hands.
To investigate these issues, we have developed a force feedback device, that innervates into the toes. The homunculus shows comparable sensitivity areas for the fingers and toes: essentially, toes have a coarsely comparable representation in the brain as fingers when it comes to skin sensitivity. Consequently, they seem to be ideal candidates to replace finger touch sensing for hand amputees.
But are they? Our device will allow us to study that, by feeding back 3 degrees of freedom for three independent toes, corresponding to forces sensed by a patient-controlled prosthetic device.
Your task would be to concentrate on the closed-loop control of our device. Low-level control has been partly obtained, but closing the higher level loops, including the feedback from the prosthetic hand, has to be proven. As soon as the system is running as smoothly as it could, the next step would be to experiment with it, thus quantifying the success of the method.