Thomas Feix

Dr. Thomas Feix

Understanding Human Grasping and Manipulation

Even though human hands are of prime importance for humans, there are still many aspects of hand functionality that are poorly understood. Increasing our knowledge in this area helps to build better prosthetic and robotic hands, haptic devices and improve hand rehabilitation.

In this talk I will present standard concepts to describe human hand motions, including an overview on human grasp classifications and how they can be synthesized into a single comprehensive taxonomy. Such taxonomies provide a common language on human hand usage and were the basis for an extensive analysis of real life hand usage of two machinists and two housekeepers. I will present the highlights of this study, including frequencies of grasp types in real life and relationships between object – grasp type and task.

Short CV:

Thomas Feix received the MSc degree in sports equipment technology from the University of Applied Sciences Technikum Wien, Vienna, Austria in 2007 and the PhD degree from the Vienna University of Technology in 2011. From 2012 – 2015 he was postdoctoral associate with the GRAB Lab, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. His research focused on human grasping and manipulation, and its application to robotics and prosthetics. Special topics of interest were the statistics of grasp usage in unstructured environments, benchmarking the in-hand manipulation capabilities of humans and comparing the fine manipulation behavior of primate hands.

Currently, Thomas Feix works in the mechanical engineering team of the adidas FUTURE team, particularly responsible for robotics and automation. The FUTURE team is a collaborative group of dedicated teams focused on footwear, apparel, hardware and manufacturing projects, driven to create the best for the athlete.