The Becker Mechanical Hand is the only truly matured and thoroughly optimized prosthetic hand that is body powered and has a truly adaptive AND precision grip [link].

Easy to see therefore that it’s a unique and superbly both powerful and attractive product. At a cost of around 400 -900 USD it is super competitively priced seeing as if even 3D printed cheapish plastic products that never even reach a fraction of a Becker hand’s functionality and reliability may cost a multiple of that.

Research, development and industry has not produced any similarly powerful product – even though there are very promising new ideas, the Becker Hand has seen decades of improvement.

The grip of the hand can be tweaked in the same way other devices can be tweaked: by adding soft padding [link].

Here it can be seen how I add layers of soft foam or faux window leather cut into strips, and then fix them to thumb or index finger using normal tape.

Even without any particular increase of spring tension, and after adding a normal work glove [link] (which was published here first as well in ~2009 [link]), lifting an irregularly shaped object such as a bottle is super simple, easy and quite reliable.

Also, holding a fork is possible in a very reliable way.

At this  stage it is relevant to point out that the shape of the Becker hand can easily be fitted with cheap hardware store work gloves such as shown here. This is because the Becker hand has a shape that is relatively similar to a biological human hand. To have that possibility, to fit normal abundantly available cheap gloves, is very important for one aspect none of these academic researchers or industrial developers ever have to put up with themselves: I want these glove covers replaced every 1-2 weeks. I want clean new glove covers all the time, for a lifetime. Because tell you what, and you don’t want to hear that: the amputation? It’s not going away anytime soon. Only once you factor that in, will you be able to get a vague idea about why it is SO important to be able to buy normal everyday typical work gloves to pull over the prosthetic hand. In generic terms: to be able to use easily available dirt cheap replaceable materials.