Abstract
As modern society becomes increasingly more elderly, developing specialized equipment to help assist this growing population in everyday tasks becomes more and more important. Here we have developed a passive gravity balanced arm support system. It was designed to assist the arm motion of elderly people with disabilities. The system consists of the joints and the link and the gas springs. This is a very simple and low cost structure. The arm support system constitutes of the support arm that protects the wrist part and the swing arm that protects the elbow. Rather than being done after recovery from paralysis as a functional disorder, rehabilitation that is undertaken by elderly impaired people using the arm balancer is often undertaken with the goal of self-support of active daily living (ADL) at an activity limit level. We evaluate the arm support system for rehabilitation.
