Design of a total wrist prosthesis.

Diseased wrist joints, in such cases as rheumatoid arthritis, are often required to be replaced by a prosthesis to relieve pain and to recover the wrist function. In designing this replacement, it is essential to understand the behavior of a normal wrist joint in its kinematic and kinetic aspects. An experimental and analytical study was conducted to obtain various parameters regarding the normal wrist joint. The significance of these parameters were discussed and are to be used for the design criteria. Based on normal wrist joint study, a universal, constrained, total replacement was designed and compared with the existing prosthesis in a laboratory experiment.