Electronics & Semiconductors

Spray-on smart skin uses AI to rapidly understand hand tasks

A new smart skin developed at Stanford University might foretell a day when people type on invisible keyboards, identify objects by touch alone, or allow users to communicate by hand gestures with apps in immersive environments.

Robotics

Robot hand moves closer to human abilities

A team of researchers affiliated with multiple institutions in Korea has developed a robot hand that has abilities similar to human hands. In their paper published in the journal Nature Communications, the group describes ...

Robotics

GPT-4 driven robot takes selfies, 'eats' popcorn

A team of researchers at the University of Tokyo has built a bridge between large language models and robots that promises more humanlike gestures while dispensing with traditional hardware-dependent controls.

Engineering

Show your hands: Smartwatches sense hand activity

We've become accustomed to our smartwatches and smartphones sensing what our bodies are doing, be it walking, driving or sleeping. But what about our hands? It turns out that smartwatches, with a few tweaks, can detect a ...

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Hand

A hand (med./lat.: manus, pl. manūs) is a prehensile, multi-fingered extremity located at the end of an arm or forelimb of primates such as humans, chimpanzees, monkeys, and lemurs. A few other vertebrates such as the koala (which has two opposable thumbs on each "hand" and fingerprints remarkably similar to human fingerprints) are often described as having either "hands" or "paws" on their front limbs.

Hands are the chief organs for physically manipulating the environment, used for both gross motor skills (such as grasping a large object) and fine motor skills (such as picking up a small pebble). The fingertips contain some of the densest areas of nerve endings on the body, are the richest source of tactile feedback, and have the greatest positioning capability of the body; thus the sense of touch is intimately associated with hands. Like other paired organs (eyes, feet, legs), each hand is dominantly controlled by the opposing brain hemisphere, so that handedness, or the preferred hand choice for single-handed activities such as writing with a pen, reflects individual brain functioning.

Some evolutionary anatomists use the term hand to refer to the appendage of digits on the forelimb more generally — for example, in the context of whether the three digits of the bird hand involved the same homologous loss of two digits as in the dinosaur hand.

The hand has 27 bones, 14 of which are the phalanges (proximal, medial, and distal) of the fingers. The metacarpal is the bone that connects the fingers and the wrist. Each human hand has 5 metacarpals.

This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA