title: Exoskeletal meal assistance system (EMAS II) for progressive muscle dystrophy patient.
abstract: This paper introduces a 4-DOFs exoskeletal meal assistance system (EMAS II) for progressive muscle dystrophy patient. It is generally better for the patient to use his/her hands by himself in daily life because active works maintain level of residual functions, health and initiative of him/her. The EMAS II that has a new joystick-type user interface device and three-DOFs on a shoulder part is enhanced for an easier operation and more comfortable support on eating, as the succeeding model of the previous system that has two-DOFs on a shoulder. In order to control the 4-DOFs system by the simple user interface device, the EMAS II simulates upper limb motion patterns of a healthy person. The motion patterns are modeled by extracting correlations between the height of a user's wrist joint and that of the user's elbow joint at the table. Moreover, the EMAS II automatically brings user's hand up to his/her mouth or back to a table when he/she pushes a preset switch on the interface device. Therefore a user has only to control a position of his/her wrist to pick or scoop foods and then flip the switch to start automatic mode, while a height of the elbow joint is automatically controlled by the EMAS II itself. The results of experiments, where a healthy subject regarded as a muscle dystrophy patient eats a meal with EMAS II, show that the subject finished her meal in a natural way in 18 minutes 40 seconds which was within a recommended time of 30 minutes.
authors.affiliation: Graduate School of Systems and Information Engineering, University of Tsukuba, 1-1-1 Tennodai, Tsukuba, 305-8573, Japan. hase@esys.tsukuba.ac.jp
authors.forename: Yasuhisa
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Hasegawa
authors.forename: Saori
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Oura
mesh_terms: D001696:Biomechanical Phenomena; D004551:Elbow Joint / Q000502:physiology; D005248:Feeding Methods; D006225:Hand / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D009068:Movement / Q000502:physiology*; D009136:Muscular Dystrophies / Q000534:rehabilitation*; D009989:Orthotic Devices; D012371:Robotics / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000379:methods; D012656:Self-Help Devices; D014955:Wrist Joint / Q000502:physiology