Clinical Trial of Transfer Motion using Nursing-care Assistant Robot - Validation by Measuring EMG Signals

摘要

Nursing care is a very important job for helping person to regain health or achieve the quality of life. However, with the increase of senior citizen and people with disability, the shortage of caregivers (i.e., Personal Care Assistant, PCA) is becoming serious. In our research center, we have developed a nursing- care assistant robot (as shown in Fig. 1). This robot was successful in lifting human up and transferring him/her between bed and wheelchair using its two human like arms [1, 2]. Stable lift-up motion has been tested for healthy subjects based on the knowledge obtained by analyzing the motion of professional caregivers[3]. In this research, in order to confirm the effectiveness of this robot and the lift-up motion, we conducted a clinical trial of patients in Nagoya City University Hospital. During this trial, every patient is lifted up and down three times. we measured the surface electromyography (EMG) signals of several muscles during the lifting-up and obtain the muscle activities. By comparing the changes of muscle activities of every operation, the efficacy of our robot and method is evaluated. This research was approved by Institutional Review Boards of Nagoya City University Hospital and RIKEN.