The pincer chopsticks: The investigation of a new utensil in pinching function

The manipulation of chopsticks requires skillful motions of fingers. Therefore, it would be difficult to manipulate chopsticks for people with hand dysfunction. We designed a simple and convenient utensil, the pincer chopsticks, to simulate the pincers-pinching operation of traditional chopsticks. To compare the performance of the new device with that of traditional chopsticks and spoons, 32 volunteers applied these utensils to pick up four kinds of food with either hand. For dominant hands, the manipulation time of both pincer and traditional chopsticks was shorter than that of spoons, while using pincer chopsticks with non-dominant hands revealed the best performance among the three experimental utensils for users without experience. In this study, the newly designed pincer chopsticks demonstrated advantages for operation and performance. It has the potential to benefit patients with impaired hands.