Abstract
In recent years, there have been many bed-ridden people because of Cerebral accidents for elderly people in Japan. Almost of them have problems of their joints, for example, the finger joint and the knee joint. In this condition, they cannot move their joints smoothly. It is called a contracture. If the symptom occurs for hand's fingers, patients have difficulties to live independently. Then, physical therapists (PT), who are a professional in rehabilitation, take an important part in improvement and prevention for patient's disability. However, rehabilitation training is very hard work because PT has to do it multiple times in a day. Accordingly, they not have much time to train many patients. For these reasons, patients cannot get appropriate training when they need. Therefore, we focus on prevention of contracture for finger joints. We are developing the device that can make extension of finger joints automatically. This device can extend joints by using cam and link mechanisms.
