Abstract
Movements of the upper limbs commonly affect activities of daily living. It is important for the aged to exercise for maintenance or recovery of upper limb functions, through detecting depression of their function, in aims to decrease the number of needing care or support aged and to stimulate engaging society of them. Application of robotics and virtual reality technology makes possible for quantitative evaluations of upper limb functions to enhance the qualitative effect of training. In this paper, the authors report on 2-D force display system and virtual maze software, which can be use as a test method for motion functions of upper limbs. This paper describes the effectiveness of the system through repeatability of the experiments and discriminability between motion functions of abled and disabled persons. The paper also shows the necessity of applying base data of the same age group for evaluations because some differences were detected between experimental results of able bodied youth and elderly.
