Students at The University of Manchester have designed and built a 3D printed, low-cost robotic prosthetic hand that could provide a much cheaper alternative for amputees.

The hand’s joints are all fully posable with each individual finger and the thumb being able to move as well as make a fist. The functionality of the hand allows its user to do simple everyday tasks such as picking up items, eating using a knife and fork, typing, clicking a mouse, or opening doors. It can even play rock-paper-scissors.

But what also makes the prototype limb standout is its cost. The students built the hand for just £307 ($430) and reckon they can make it even less expensively. In comparison an advanced robotic prosthetic limb can start at approximately £25,000 ($35,000), going up to £60,000 ($85,000) if bought privately. More affordable robotic hands with just basic multi-grip functionality still start at £3,000 ($4,200).

The design won “best new development” in the Digital Innovation Challenge at the recent Industry 4.0 Summit and Factories of the Future Expo which was held at Manchester Central, in Manchester. Industry 4.0 is the term given to what some regard as the fourth industrial revolution.

The hand is the brainchild (and a final year Mechanical Engineering Master’s) of Alex Agboola-Dobson and his team – lead electrical engineer Sebastian Preston-Jensen, lead software engineer Panagiotis Papathanasiou and mechanical and software engineers Maximillian Rimmer and Shao Hian Liew.

According to the NHS around 6,000 major limb amputations are carried out each year in the UK alone. None-robotic Prosthetic Limbs available on the NHS are either purely cosmetic, whilst other more functional ones are simple plastic-molded limbs with hooks. This was also another inspiration for the team’s futuristic, but life like design.

“Not only do we want to make it affordable, we want people to actually like the look of it and not be ashamed or embarrassed of using or wearing it. Some traditional prosthetics can both look and feel cumbersome or, those that don’t, are extremely expensive. We think our design really can make a difference and we will be looking to commercialize the project in the future,” says Agboola-Dobson.

Connectivity is another key advantage of their design as it comes with blue tooth connection and an Android app for a smartphone. The hand is controlled by muscle sensors placed on the wearer’s arm that can be paired to the app, which was also designed by the group.

“The functionality is customised through the phone app, but the muscle sensors provide the control by moving the hand whenever necessary. It is really simple to use,” Agboola-Dobson says.

The actual manufacturing of the hand is by a type of 3D printing called stereolithography (SLA) printing, which uses a high quality resin plastic for production. Eventually the team are aiming to move to fused deposition modeling (FDM) 3D printing, which will make the hand even less expensive to produce, but will not lose any of its quality.

Dr. Carl Diver, from the School of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Civil Engineering, says: “We are really delighted for them, it was a great experience for them to pitch their idea in front of a panel of experts and the prize money will help them develop the idea further. This will be a great addition to their CV. We are very excited to see what the future holds for this group and their innovative creation.”

A long-range ferroelectric domain with nanoscale structure heterogeneity (4nm to 8nm) is evidenced by high-resolution TEM. (Image: Fei Li/Penn State)

University Park, Pennsylvania — Development of a theoretical basis for ultra-high piezoelectricity in ferroelectric materials led to a new material with twice the piezo response of any existing commercial ferroelectric ceramics, according to an international team of researchers from Penn State, China, and Australia.

Piezoelectricity is the material property at the heart of medical ultrasound, sonar, active vibration control, and many sensors and actuators. A piezoelectric material has the ability to mechanically deform when an electric voltage is applied or to generate electric charge when a mechanical force is applied.

Adding small amounts of a carefully selected rare earth material, samarium, to a high-performance piezoelectric ceramic called lead magnesium niobate-lead titanate (PMN-PT) dramatically increases its piezo performance. This materials-by-design strategy will be useful in designing materials for other applications as well, the team believes.

"This is not the typical way to develop new materials," says the team's co-corresponding author, Long-Qing Chen, Donald W. Hamer Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, professor of mathematics, and professor of engineering science and mechanics, Penn State. "The majority of existing useful materials are discovered by trial-and-error experiments. But here we designed and synthesized a new piezoelectric ceramic guided by theory and simulations."

The team first analyzed the impact of adding various chemical dopants on the local structure of an existing ferroelectric ceramic. They were then able to reduce the pool of effective dopants by comparing the measured dielectric losses with the signatures obtained from phase-field simulations. After the screening of dopants, they then focused on optimizing the process and composition to achieve the ultrahigh piezoelectricity.

"This work is based on an understanding of the origin of ultrahigh piezoelectricity in the ferroelectric crystals that were developed 30 years ago. Our new understanding suggested that local structure heterogeneity plays an important role in piezoelectricity in ferroelectrics, which also can be extended to other functionalities," said co-corresponding author Shujun Zhang, a professor of materials science formerly at Penn State and now at the University of Wollongong in Australia.

Local structure heterogeneity refers to nanoscale-size structural distortions within a host material created by doping a small amount of chemical species, in this case doping samarium in PMN-PT ceramics, as a way to modify the thermodynamic energy landscape of the material, which in turn increases the dielectric properties – the ability of a material to respond to an electrostatic field – and the piezoelectric effect.

"This material is a good choice to use in transducers, such as those used in medical ultrasound," states lead author Fei Li, a research associate at Penn State. "We already have devices made from our material by a group at the University of Southern California."

That device, called a needle transducer, uses a submillimeter piezoelectric element of the Penn State material, fitted into a standard needle or catheter, in order to perform minimally invasive procedures, to image inside the body or to guide precision surgery inside the body. The device has better performance than existing devices with the same dimensions, Li said.

Penn State has filed a provisional patent on the material.

Additional authors are Dabin Lin and ChunChun Li, visiting scholars in Penn State's Materials Research Institute; Zhuo Xu, a professor at Xi'an Jiaotong University, China; and Australian co-authors Zibin Chen, Zhenxiang Cheng, Jianli Wang, Qianwei Huang and Xiaozhou Liao. Thomas Shrout, emeritus professor in the Materials Research Institute, designed the study along with Fei Li, Long-Qing Chen and Shujun Zhang. The Nature Materials paper is titled "Ultrahigh Piezoelectricity in Ferroelectric Ceramics by Design."

The U.S. Office of Naval Research Global, the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation of China, and the Australian Research Council all supported this work.

Russia’s National University of Science and Technology (NUST MISIS) scientists, with colleagues from the Ecole de Technologie Superiore, Montreal, Canada, have experienced a new combination of alloy processing that produces solid and durable implants that are fully compatible with the human body. The research article is published in the Journal of Alloys and Compounds.

The authors sought to develop an industrial technology for the production of metal rod stocks which are used in the production of modern bone implants, and in particular, for treatment of spinal problems.

This new generation of alloys made on the basis of Ti-Zr-Nb (titanium-zirconium-niobium) which possesses a high functional complex and so-called superelasticity (able to restore the original shape against large and repeated deformation) are the working material.

According to scientists, these alloys are the most promising class of metallic biomaterials. This is due to the unique combination of their biochemical and biomechanical properties: Ti-Zr-Nb differs from the complete biocompatibility of composition and high corrosion resistance, while at the same time exhibiting hyperelastic behavior – very similar to normal bone behavior.

“Our method of combined thermomechanical processing of alloys - in particular, radial-displacement rolling and rotary forging – allows researchers to get the highest quality blanks for biocompatible implants by controlling their structure and properties. Such processing of blanks gives them an outstanding resistance to fatigue and overall functional stability,” says Vadim Sheremetyev, one of research authors, and a senior research associate at NUST MISIS.

According to Sheremetyev, the high-quality rod stocks have already found a potential customer. A large Russian manufacturer of medical products made of titanium is an industrial partner of NUST MISIS’s project. Together with them, scientists are now developing a technology to obtain beams for spinal transpedicular fixation, which should improve the therapy quality in severe cases of scoliosis.

Additionally, scientists are now aimed at developing the thermomechanical processing and optimizing technology modes to obtain materials of the necessary form and sizes with the best complexity of properties.

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