ARM

About the Discipline

Grabbing, moving and feeling with a prosthetic hand

An amputation above the hand or a congenital malformation may lead to significant challenges in everyday life. While many of the latest arm prostheses provide a wide variety of grip patterns, their use and range of functions are often not completely satisfactory for their users. The devices often still lack some of the fundamental functionalities of a human hand, such as wrist flexion and extension or the control of individual fingers. Missing degrees of freedom often results in non-physiological, compensatory movements. Most devices also do not provide depth perception or haptic sensory information, which can lead to a lack of acceptance of the prosthesis. Arm prostheses that enable the functions of a human hand in a natural way and which fulfil the users’ expectations and needs have the promising potential to prevent negative long-term effects such as neck pain or back pain due to non-physiological movement or anatomical asymmetry.

The competition tasks will test various abilities, such as sensory feedback from the hand, the ability to rotate the palm upwards and downwards, or the ability to cope with objects of different sizes, shapes, and weights, as well as coordination of both hands. In general, the tasks will contain more variability and uncertainty about the exact structure or about the exact arrangement of the different objects compared to the competitions in 2016 and 2020.