The COVVI Glove
The COVVI Glove is made from silicone with a soft-touch coating and boasts thicker integrated fingertip pads, which improves the life of the glove. The index finger is also coated to allow the user to use touch screens, which many other prosthetic hands are still not compatible with, and in some cases require a wand to even type on a normal keyboard. At every stage of design, we’ve thought about how prosthetics need to respond to modern day life, so we ensured that the COVVI Hand was not only compatible with these new technologies, but could actually be used to operate them at an acceptable level.
Throughout the evolution of the COVVI Hand, the glove has undergone several design iterations to improve its durability, strength and robustness during day-to-day use. Here is an overview of these changes and the impact we believe they’ll make.
Our Main Goals
The glove and cover package has undergone a redesign in an attempt to embody the lessons learned from the initial glove design with respect to:
- Wear resistance and overall lifetime improvement
- Improving functionality by enabling the drive systems to work more efficiently
- Maintaining aesthetic quality
Removing the palmar cover was an important design consideration upon receiving the feedback of customers in the field. At COVVI, we are always listening to the customer’s needs and as such their valuable feedback has led us towards a much improved and robust design. As a result of removing the palmar cover in this space, we have thickened the silicone surface to provide users with the additional security and confidence to manoeuvre their hands in ways that many bionic hands cannot withstand.
The COVVI Glove Overview
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Two Tone Painted Dorsal Cover
Increase Hardness On Fingertips
Rubberised Wrist Retention
Hard Silicone Moulded Digit Covers
Exaggerated Knuckle Profile For Improved Wear Resistance
Improved Gripping Texture
Removal Of Palmar Cover For A Thickened Palmar Surface
The New Fingertips
Changing the styling of the finger-grip features was a must-exercise in ensuring our customers can grip objects more effectively. Coupled with the new and improved drive routines on the electrical drive of the motors, the digit-tip surfaces have been remodelled to serve more functionality.
Flats have been introduced to enable the potential of gripping smaller objects. This will be complemented with a ‘serrated’ like texturing across the entire palp region, to improve the friction greatly when gripping objects.
Robust and Reliable
The next point of focus in the new glove was to exaggerate the slack in regions that really needed it. This meant the knuckle profile underwent a styling change to introduce more material for the situations when the fingers fully close (in power grip for example) – such that the wear along the knuckles is minimised. The bellows that follow the thumbs opposition also had to undergo a styling change to introduce more material for the situations when the thumb rotates to opposed (in tripod, precision grips for example).
With this new glove, we wanted to provide a more robust solution against the current style which is championed in its cosmetic quality. Silicone digit covers have been implemented which are now bonded to the glove as one-piece and act as a reliable bonding method as opposed to hard-plastic shells on a silicone membrane. This will greatly improve the reliability of the glove as a stand-alone item.
