Development and Optimal Design of a Telescopic Boom Lift for Nursing Care Using a Multibody Dynamics Approach

抄録

Recently a number of nursing care equipments to aid lift and transfer for aged person have been developed. Especially, rotational boom type care lifts are widely used due to its simplicity and usefulness. However, this type of lifts sometimes provide a feeling of uneasiness since while lift-up human body center moves backward than the position of the heel. Hence, in this paper, we propose a telescopic boom type care lift in order to approximate lift-up motion to a natural human standing-up trajectory. By using a multibody dynamics approach, we show that the proposed mechanism can achieve nearly natural standing-up motion and is able to reduce required force to lift-up than conventional type lift. Then, we develop a prototype telescopic boom type care lift and verify its effectiveness through experiments. Finally, we also consider the optimal design problem of the proposed care lift structure.