WHEN it comes to emulating the human hand, engineers still have a long way to go. But a robotic hand developed by Paul Chappell at the University of Southampton, UK, does a better job than most of allowing people who have lost a hand to perform tasks that most people take for granted – like grappling with a door key or twisting the lid off a jar.
Unlike most artificial hands, which are either fixed in one position or perform a single movement, each finger of Chappell’s hand is controlled by a separate motor, and the thumb can rotate and shift…
