| Sumario: | Purpose Meal assistance is a basic and important service in the care of patients or elderly people with muscle weakness. Many meal assistive devices have been developed to address the caregivers shortage (MOMO, 2020). Automatic devices are ideal for disabled people with little residual muscular strength. Arm-supported devices have been widely commercialized to augment muscle strength mainly with spring mechanisms. This study proposes a meal assistive robot with a motor for vertical movement based on gravity compensation. This method can be used by people who have difficulty with passive arm-supported devices to avoid the use of fully-automated devices. The arm-supported device can assist people with muscular dystrophy but has distinct limitations. The proposed method can assist vertical movement with an electrical motor and free horizontal movement according to the user's intention. In this method, a spring is used with the motor to reduce motor torque. The usability of the meal assistive robot is evaluated with several factors such as effectiveness and satisfaction. Method Figure 1 shows the schematic structure of a meal-assistive robot, IndiMeal2. The robot is fixed firmly on the table with a clamp. A user's forearm is put on the armrest of the robot and a spoon is fixed at the end of the robot with a magnet. The robotic motion is divided into horizontal and vertical movements. Three links without a motor implement horizontal movement and the vertical movement is implement using a twisted string actuator (TSA) with a spring in parallel (Gaponov et al., 2013). A controller is embedded into the robot and is controlled by a remote-control panel. A user or a caregiver can preset the mouth to food distance to ensure adequate meal behavior. The skipping function reduces the waiting time required to chew food in the mouth or scooping of food by a spoon. The repetitive up-down motion near food eases effective scooping of food. The meal assistive robot can be also controlled and monitored by a smartphone or a server PC. Results and Discussion This study investigates the mechanical design and control of a meal assistive robot to compensate gravity for vertical movement and ease horizontal movement with little external force (Kim et al., 2022). TSA with a spring mechanism is used for active vertical movement and gravity compensation. The controller embedded into the robot is used to preset the distance from the mouth to food. The controller can be controlled in multimodal manners, via a remote-control panel, a smartphone or a server PC. The effectiveness and satisfaction of people with muscular weakness evaluated using the usability test.
|
|---|