Designing and Manufacturing Intelligent Sensory Membrane Embedded in Contact Area between Stump Skin and Prosthesis Socket

Detecting the forces which the stump skin tissue is subjected to while in contact with the socket is an important concern in designing amputation prosthesis. In this paper we present the design and fabrication of the intelligent sensory membrane(ISM) that can be applied in any medical applications where the keyword requirements are flexibility, three-axial force measurement and miniaturization. In order to demonstrate and investigate the ability of the sensor to measure both normal and shear forces, preliminary characterization experiments have been performed using a purposely developed characterization workstation. The coefficient of determination, that quantifies the linearity of the curve as it is close to one, is found of 0.997 for all the outputs