Think of the complexity of ordinary hand activity and how to describe it all, both precisely and concisely. The author, a noted occupational therapist in Japan, offers a disciplined approach to doing just that. Whereas research has heretofore been limited mainly to how the hand grips, the methodology here is set up to account for grips, non-grip postures, and movement patterns, based on thousands of laboratory observations. This approach can provide hand experts with specific ways to conceptualize and study hand disabilities, artificial hands, and robotic hands. The author first surveys research over the past 100 years on forms that the hand normally assumes, noting the preponderance of studies on hand grips, with less attention having been paid to what the hand looks like when in non-g...