Dexter.io

Making surgery more accessible 1 hand at a time

Inspiration

Wanted to develop a solution for future needs of remote robotic surgery, for people to get the healthcare operations they need.

What it does

Using an input glove device hooked up to flex sensors, we are able to mimic our input hand movements remotely using bluetooth on a 3d printed robotic hand, powered by servos

How I built it

Built our own flex sensors using velostat (conductive sheet that acts as a variable resistor) and copper wire, in order to detect finger movements, fed this analog data via an Arduino. The arduino has an input bluetooth module which is connected to our output bluetooth module in order to relay our finger movements to our remote robot. The remote robot was 3D printed, and servo motors control the finger movements based on the input data from the incoming bluetooth data transfer.

Challenges I ran into

Making our own flex sensors, they are very difficult to make from scratch, since real flex sensors are $20/piece, we resorted to creating a flex sensor using velostat, copper tape, wires, and paper.