Multiarticulate bionic arms are now capable of mimicking the endogenous movements of the human hand. 3D-printing has reduced the cost of prosthetic hands themselves, but there is currently no low-cost alternative to dexterous electromyographic (EMG) control systems. To address this need, we developed an inexpensive (~$675) and portable EMG control system by integrating low-cost microcontrollers with an EMG acquisition device. We validated signal acquisition by comparing the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of our system with that of a high-end research-grade system. We also demonstrate the ability to use the low-cost control system for proportional and independent control of various prosthetic hands in real-time. We found that the SNR of the low-cost control system was statistically no worse than 44% of the SNR of a research-grade control system. The RMSEs of predicted hand movements (from a modified Kalman filter) were typically a few percent better than, and not more than 6% worse than, RMSEs of a research-grade system for up to six degrees of freedom when only relatively few (six) EMG electrodes were used. However, RMSEs were generally higher than RMSEs of research-grade systems that utilize considerably more (32) EMG electrodes, guiding future work towards increasing electrode count. Successful instantiation of this low-cost control system constitutes an important step towards the commercialization and wide-spread availability of dexterous bionic hands.
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