The human hand can take on a huge variety of shapes and functions, providing its owner with a powerful hammer at one time or a delicate pair of forceps at another. The universal utility of the hand is even more enhanced by the ability to amplify the function of the hand by using tools. To understand and appreciate how the human brain controls movements of the hand, it is important to investigate both the healthy motor behaviour and dysfunction during everyday manipulative tasks. This book provides a contemporary summary of the physiology and pathophysiology of the manipulative and exploratory functions of the human hand. With contributions from scientists and clinical researchers of biomechanics, kinesiology, neurophysiology, psychology, physical medicine and rehabilitation, it covers the development of healthy human grasping over the lifespan, the wide spectrum of disability in the pathological state and links basic motor research with modern brain sciences.

Provides a contemporary summary of the physiology and pathophysiology of the manipulative and exploratory functions of the human hand.

Reaching for objects in our surroundings is an everyday activity that most humans perform seamlessly a hundred times a day. It is nonetheless a complex behavior that requires the perception of objects’ features, action selection, movement planning, multi-joint coordination, force regulation, and the integration of all of these properties during the actions themselves to meet the successful demands of extremely varied task goals. Even though reach-to-grasp behavior has been studied for decades, it has, in recent years, become a particularly growing area of multidisciplinary research because of its crucial role in activities of daily living and broad range of applications to other fields, including physical rehabilitation, prosthetics, and robotics. This volume brings together novel and exciting research that sheds light into the complex sensory-motor processes involved in the selection and production of reach-to-grasp behaviors. It also offers a unique life-span and multidisciplinary perspective on the development and multiple processes involved in the formation of reach-to-grasp. It covers recent and exciting discoveries from the fields of developmental psychology and learning sciences, neurophysiology and brain sciences, movement sciences, and the dynamic field of developmental robotics, which has become a very active applied field relying on biologically inspired models. This volume is a rich and valuable resource for students and professionals in all of these research fields, as well as cognitive sciences, rehabilitation, and other applied sciences.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the conference on Haptics: Generating and Perceiving Tangible Sensations, held in Amsterdam, Netherlands in July 2010.

This book looks at the common problems both human and robotic hands encounter when controlling the large number of joints, actuators and sensors required to efficiently perform motor tasks such as object exploration, manipulation and grasping. The authors adopt an integrated approach to explore the control of the hand based on sensorimotor synergies that can be applied in both neuroscience and robotics. Hand synergies are based on goal-directed, combined muscle and kinematic activation leading to a reduction of the dimensionality of the motor and sensory space, presenting a highly effective solution for the fast and simplified design of artificial systems. Presented in two parts, the first part, Neuroscience, provides the theoretical and experimental foundations to describe the synergistic organization of the human hand. The second part, Robotics, Models and Sensing Tools, exploits the framework of hand synergies to better control and design robotic hands and haptic/sensing systems/tools, using a reduced number of control inputs/sensors, with the goal of pushing their effectiveness close to the natural one. Human and Robot Hands provides a valuable reference for students, researchers and designers who are interested in the study and design of the artificial hand.

Despite the intensive experimental and theoretical studies for over a century, the general processes involved in neural control of pasture and movement, in learning of motor behaviour in healthy subjects and in adaptation in pathology were and remain a challenging problems for the scientists in the field of sensorimotor control. The book is the outcome of the Advanced Research Workshop Sensorimotor Control, where the focus was on the state and the perspectives of the study in the field.