A low cost haptic mouse for prosthetic socket modeling

This paper refers to the design of prosthetic socket adopting a computer-aided approach. The main goal is to make available a modeling tool, named SMA-Socket Modeling Assistant, which permits to replicate/emulate manual operations usually performed by the prosthetist. Typically, s/he also relies on the sense of touch; therefore the underlying idea has been to develop and experiment haptic devices. The paper presents a haptic mouse at low-cost to make it affordable also by small orthopedic labs. It is essentially a traditional mouse device enhanced with a servomotor and a pressure sensor pad integrated with Arduino board and SMA. The application within SMA is described as well as the haptic interaction with physically-based model of the residual limb. Finally preliminary tests are illustrated.