Our first subsystem was the mechanical glove that held the sensors and wiring to be attached to the prosthetic device.

Design of the mechanical glove was centered around the ability to accommodate a wide variety of prosthetic sizes and shapes, through the use of accessible materials. With the intent of providing a platform for sensors, the re-configurable glove consists of a central palm unit and individual finger sleeves. Ultimately allowing for up to 5 sleeves, and 3 sensors per sleeve.

The final prototype makes use of 3 sensor at the fingertips for an emphasis on fine motor skills. Each sleeve consists of a finger pouch constructed with a leather surface strip for sensor adherence and surrounding woven elastic for expansion and contraction with varying fingertip sizes. The pockets are sewn to a vertical banded elastic strip that adapts to differences in finger length by also allowing for stretching and relaxing the material before adherence to the central palm unit.

This palm unit consists of a wrist strap and elastic palm band sewn to a large leather patch to create stability and grounding for the sleeves. To facilitate the strong bond between the sleeves and palm unit, velcro strips are incorporated on each of the mating components.

Future implementations of the glove could introduce expansion of sensor numbers and sleeves, with sophisticated wiring channels and the use of larger scale manufacturing to standardize the reconfigurable glove design.

Our second subsystem was the sensor circuitry that allowed the device to measure stimuli from the prosthesis and relay them to the user. This system contained our amplifiers for the sensors, the audio generation circuit, and the microcontroller that served to connect the two halves together.

We designed our amplifier to be adaptable to a different number of sensor inputs so that the user could chose the sensor configuration and information density that best suited them. The shared amplifier also allows for the initial calibration of the system to be more streamlined and for there to be less variation between the sensors over time.

The audio generation circuit took advantage of commonly utilized audio amplifiers to allow our device to connect to standard ear phones.

The microcontroller served as the central processor in our system. We utilized the open source Teensy 3.6 to allow for high speed while keeping cost low. As with the sensor amplifier, the microcontroller is set up to work with different numbers of sensors. And because the initial prototype was designed around a small number of sensors, there is lots of room to grow without the need to change processors.