Grasping

The human hand has amazing abilities to grasp and dexterously manipulate objects, which until today have not been reproduced using robotic hands. My research has looked at some of the ways we exploit the redundancy in the human hand (in that we have more degrees of freedom than necessary) to successfully use our hands. I have looked at the kinematics (movements) of grasping: how the grasps we select are affected by the task (Friedman & Flash, 2007), and the trajectories we choose when grasping (Friedman & Flash, 2009). I have also looked at how we coordinate forces during grasping (Friedman, Latash & Zatsiorsky, 2009, Latash et al. 2010) and how the variance is coordinated when using multiple fingers during force production (Kapur et al., 2010, Friedman et al., 2009). We have also examined how this coordination develops in typically developing children (Shaklai et al., 2017) and children with cerebral palsy and acquired brain injury (Mimouni-Bloch et al., 2010).