Mission

The HandCorpus is an open access repository for sharing and retrieving human and robot hand data. It was originally created within the European Project The Hand Embodied, with the objective of making data collections and analyses about human hand publicly available, and now it is sponsored and supported by many other important European Projects and international research groups.

The interest about human hand has gained an increasing attention in the last decades and the ‘’hand’’ research community has incredibly grown up to involve different groups, ranging from neuroscience to robotics. Of course, we study hands to understand the language of human embodiment but also to try to reproduce this incredible language under a technological point of view. Under these considerations, the importance to have a common scientific framework is crucial. With this as motivation, the HandCorpus is born to endow the ‘’hand’’ research community of a tool for sharing the experimental results in an efficient manner, thus enabling a direct comparison and discussion between different methods and technique benchmarking.

Up to now, the HandCorpus collects data about human hand kinematics, including descriptions about the experimental setup, post-processing elaboration, videos and analysis/visualization tools. However, any contribution from any field regarding human hand and fingers (e.g. anatomical data, Electromyography, etc.) as well as human arm is welcomed and warmly encouraged. More specifically, also data about robotic hands are included (e.g. kinematic models, design specifications, etc.), to enable technical benchmarking and a more direct comparison between “human and artificial side”.

Everyone interested in the amazing world of the human and robot hands can obtain data or share her/his own data, by simply following the three links: Experimental Data (for “raw” data), Data Analyses and Results (for post-processed data) and Robot Hand Data. It is also possible to use and share analysis/visualization tools for both robotic and neuroscientific data and tactile sensing using the link “Tools”, as well as additional material and videos. The HandCorpus provides an accurate and coherent record for citing data sets, giving due credit to authors. Data sets are hierarchically indexed and can be easily retrieved using keywords and advanced search operations. A blog, a newsletter, a publication repository and HandCorpus profiles in all major social networks are also provided. Finally it must be noted that the HandCorpus website is cross-platform, cross-browser and easily accessible through mobile devices, such as internet enabled smartphones and tablets

Our strong belief is that sharing is the key for pushing forward progress!

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