Can Prosthetic Hands Feel?

Barber Prosthetics Clinic & Bertille Dupont & Dr. John Madden at UBC

Fun Fact: Most prosthetic hands cannot operate touch screen phones.  But, there are many groups looking to address this!

One of the challenges of using a prosthetic hand is that they do not have feeling. It’s hard to tell if you are touching something, what you are touching, and how hard you are squeezing it. A team at UBC has been working on a project that would allow users of prostheses to feel what touches their prosthetic hands when wearing their prostheses. They partnered with us to refine this technology, gather feedback from people who would benefit from it, and gain insights on how to develop it so it can be incorporated into prostheses in the future. We completed the preliminary work to assess how this technology may be integrated into a prosthetic hand, but there is lots more work to be done!