Abstract

The number of people with disabilities is growing in Japan. They are facing many kinds of difficulties in their daily lives (1,2) . Especially, for the people with upper limb disabilities, it is even difficult in having meals by themselves. The systems which are able to help them in having meals are expected. There are already several types of assistant robots which are operated with joysticks or touch sensors. However, people with upper limb disabilities can barely operate the robots with full functions. Therefore, a maneuverable meal assistance robot which is easy to operate with an eye-interface is proposed for people with upper limb disabilities. The proposed robot with orthogonal structure, that offers simple and stable motions, is able to provide foods to users smoothly. The robot is operated by user’s eye blink. The blink is designed to be detected by a web camera connected to control unit based on Raspberry Pi. Thus, the system in compact size can complete the food providing effectively.

Highlights

  • In Japan, the number of people with disabilities is growing in recent years

  • For the people with upper limb disabilities, it is even difficult to have meals by themselves. They have to get assistance from their family or helpers in eating. It is a frustrated situation for the care receivers who cannot complete basic daily activities

  • To help the care receivers in eating, it is important to match the pace and amount of help giver and receiver. It is such a careful work that the meal assistance requires at least one helper in a meal in home nursing or at care centers

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Summary

Introduction

In Japan, the number of people with disabilities is growing in recent years. Owing to the background of aging society, the growth is considered to continue in near future[1,2]. For the people with upper limb disabilities, it is even difficult to have meals by themselves They have to get assistance from their family or helpers in eating. It is a robot system to provide support in daily life of users This system helps in eating by spoon up food to users. The robot arm is operated by using a joystick For this reason, it is difficult to operate the iARM for people with upper limb disabilities. The manipulators help in eating by griping articulated robots introduced are not easy to avoid vibration food. The eye-interface which is applied to make the robot easy to use to people with upper limb disabilities is introduced in Sect.

Structure of proposed meal assistance robot
Choice food and provide
Available provided foods
Algorism for deliberate blink detection
Experiment for surveying specs of proposed interface
Findings
Conclusions
Full Text
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