  The hand is one of the most complex and important parts of the human body.
The dexterity provided by its multiple degrees of freedom enables us to perform
many of the tasks of daily living which involve grasping and manipulating
objects of interest. Contemporary prosthetic devices for people with
transradial amputations or wrist disarticulation vary in complexity, from
passive prosthetics to complex devices that are body or electrically driven.
One of the important challenges in developing smart prosthetic hands is to
create devices which are able to mimic all activities that a person might
perform and address the needs of a wide variety of users. The approach explored
here is to develop algorithms that permit a device to adapt its behavior to the
preferences of the operator through interactions with the wearer. This device
uses multiple sensing modalities including muscle activity from a myoelectric
armband, visual information from an on-board camera, tactile input through a
touchscreen interface, and speech input from an embedded microphone. Presented
within this paper are the design, software and controls of a platform used to
evaluate this architecture as well as results from experiments deigned to
quantify the performance.
