A New Soft Pneumatic Elbow Pad for Joint Assistance with Application to Smart Campus

Xifeng Gao, Yao Sun, Lina Hao, Hui Yang, Yang Chen, Chaoqun Xiang

Research output: Contribution to journalArticle (Academic Journal)peer-review

15 Citations (Scopus)
265 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

This paper presents an assistance equipment of human elbow joint which aims to help patients who have elbow injury issues in smart campus environment. A new type of soft pneumatic elbow pad (SPEP) which adopted soft material manufacturing technology is presented. Compared with the rigid assistant equipment, the SPEP shows more comfort, smaller equipment size and convenience of wearing. Meanwhile, three different types of sensors (the air pressure sensor, bending sensor and force sensor) are used in SPEP to discover the two important characteristics which are applied. In order to verify effectiveness of the designed SPEP, two analysis methods are presented. The surface electromyogram (sEMG) signal and the root mean square (RMS) analysis are used in the first method which prove that SPEP could reduce the activity of the muscle and assist power during the elbow movement. Compared with the first method, the second method which is the model of calculation after wearing SPEP can obtain specific value of assisting power in the biceps and olecranon. Thus, the aforementioned methods illustrate the feasibility of SPEP. Finally, in order to make SPEP used in daily life, a portable backpack with the control system and the energy system is applied to the field of human assistance equipment.

Original languageEnglish
Number of pages10
JournalIEEE Access
Early online date3 Jul 2018
DOIs
Publication statusE-pub ahead of print - 3 Jul 2018

Keywords

  • Elbow
  • Fabrication
  • mechanical analysis
  • portable design
  • Pressure sensors
  • Robots
  • Rubber
  • sEMG and RMS analysis
  • Sensor phenomena and characterization
  • smart campus environment
  • Soft pneumatic elbow pad

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