  Prosthetic arms and hands that can be controlled by the user's
electromyography (EMG) signals are emerging. Eventually, these advanced
prosthetic devices will be expected to touch and be touched by other people. As
realistic as they may look, the currently available prosthetic hands have
physical properties that are still far from the characteristics of human skins
because they are much stiffer. In this paper, different configurations of
synthetic finger phalanges have been investigated for their skin compliance
behaviour and have been compared with the phalanges of the human fingers and a
phalanx from a commercially available prosthetic hand. Handshake tests were
performed to identify which areas on the human hand experience high contact
forces. After these areas were determined, experiments were done on selected
areas using an indenting probe to obtain the force-displacement curves. Finite
element simulations were used to compare the force-displacement results of the
synthetic finger phalanx designs with that of the experimental results from the
human and prosthetic finger phalanges. The simulation models were used to
investigate the effects of (i) varying the internal topology of the finger
phalanx and (ii) varying different materials for the internal and external
layers.
