HanDi the Animatronic Hand

Inspiration

For people without the free range of motion that we take for granted, we wanted to create a tool that will give them back that feeling of freedom. There is an estimated 282,000 people currently living with spinal cord injury and the lack of free upper body function leads to a lot of dependence on others which we hope to minimize with our project to improve their quality of life. HanDi

What it does

The HanDi aims to provide a free range of motion for the user and will function just like any normal hand would.

How we built it

Using a mixture of C++ on the backend for the functions and arduino as the conduit for the code to run the servo motors, and coroplast to create the hand, the HanDi comes together to provide an extra range of motion for the user.

Challenges we ran into

Being online is, as always, challenging because, as we would like to meet up and work together to work on the HanDi together we were unable to do so causing the work to fall on only one of our members to do all of the hard physical labor necessary to make the HanDi, while another wrote the code to get the HanDi to actually move. Time constraints also became more and more apparent as we approached the deadline. Examples of this was with rushing the flex sensors and the animatronic hand (e.g. glue not drying in-time) and then this led to a whole load of complications.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're very happy with the final product. There's so much room for improvement for our future creations and being able to come up with an idea and produce it with our diverse skill set made us happy as we realized how impactful and fun of a project this was.

What we learned

On the product side, it was extremely difficult coming up with an idea, and hard trying to create our project in a short span of time and determining if we had enough materials in order to actually produce our idea. Since our team was quite brand new to hackathons and diverse in the terms of skillsets we had, we were jumping from idea to ideas.

What's next for HanDi

A big challenge of the project was being able to provide a larger range of motion for individuals. Given more time, we'd be able to implement controls to rotate and bend the arm for the user. Also we'd like to add a way to move the animatronic arm around with a camera so the user could find what they need without actually physically moving. A possible future to dream of is extending beyond the focus of the upper body limbs and expand to the lower body as well going from HanDi to BoDi.