A Vision-Enabled Prosthetic Hand for Children with Upper Limb Disabilities

This paper introduces a novel AI vision-enabled pediatric prosthetic hand designed to assist children aged 10-12 with upper limb disabilities. The prosthesis features an anthropomorphic appearance, multi-articulating functionality, and a lightweight design that mimics a natural hand, making it both accessible and affordable for low-income families. Using 3D printing technology and integrating advanced machine vision, sensing, and embedded computing, the prosthetic hand offers a low-cost, customizable solution that addresses the limitations of current myoelectric prostheses. A micro camera is interfaced with a low-power FPGA for real-time object detection and assists with precise grasping. The onboard DL-based object detection and grasp classification models achieved accuracies of 96% and 100% respectively. In the force prediction, the mean absolute error was found to be 0.018. The features of the proposed prosthetic hand can thus be summarized as: a) a wrist-mounted micro camera for artificial sensing, enabling a wide range of hand-based tasks; b) real-time object detection and distance estimation for precise grasping; and c) ultra-low-power operation that delivers high performance within constrained power and resource limits.

@article{sarker2025_2504.15654,
  title={ A Vision-Enabled Prosthetic Hand for Children with Upper Limb Disabilities },
  author={ Md Abdul Baset Sarker and Art Nguyen and Sigmond Kukla and Kevin Fite and Masudul H. Imtiaz },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.15654},
  year={ 2025 }
}