One of the greatest parts about my role at TI is seeing the amazing projects from students facilitated by our semiconductors. My face lights up on a campus tour when someone asks "Would you like to see what we've been working on?". You'll see me moving slowly from booth to booth at a design fair or conference demo session soaking in the creative energy from the students as they explain their master pieces.
On my recent trip to Maker Faire, San Mateo, California, I was honored to interview Julio E. Fajardo and his team from Galileo University in Guatemala City who unveiled their design for the Galileo Hand at the show.
The team is working to develop a low cost, open source, mechanical/bionic, 3D printed, prosthetic hand/arm which they plan to distribute as a do it yourself kit so that people with disabilities could contact their local maker to help them build the system. Personally, he is in charge of developing the myoelectric controller for the prosthetic. The main idea is to take myoelectric signals directly from the arm using surface mounted electrodes, obtain some characteristics with Digital Signal Processing algorithms and then put them in a Machine Learning Neural Network to recognize the intention of the user and finally create that movement with the bionic hand.
Inspired by wanting to help the potentially thousands of users of prosthesis especially in their home country of Guatemala and an article by MakerBot, the team set out with a mechanical prototype and their electronic one. They are developing a system with sensors on the body to read the intention of the user and a microcontroller unit with an embedded artificial intelligence interpreting that intention and executing the action/movement
Currently, the system is trained only with open and close actions. To achieve this, the team is using Texas Instruments’ EK-TM4C123GXL LaunchPad, the ARM CMSIS DSP Library, the TI TM4C Peripheral Library and the Olimex EMG-EKG Shield to obtain myoelectric signals. Take a look at their growing video library.
Here is a photo of Julio demonstrating the system. “My experience at Maker Faire was great! We never thought there would be so much interest in these types of projects, or that there would already be such a large community of people working on it,” said Julio. “We met other key players and hope to collaborate with them.”
Julio and his team are already excited about future plans for the project with possible life-changing technology that may help thousands of people with a range of uses.
“At the moment, a Guatemalan ex-soldier is using the mechanical version of the prosthetic arm and giving us great feedback. After about two to three months, we plan on upgrading his mechanical version with the bionic version. If that works, we plan on releasing it as a DIY kit to the general public,” said Julio.
To read more about the signal collection and processing of the prosthetic arm project, visit the ARM Community page here.
I'll be posting more Student Project Highlight blogs in this series. Send me a note and tell me about your or your students projects using TI technology, I'd love to hear about it ... and hopefully come to see it!
See you on campus soon,
Cathy Wicks
TI University Program Manager