McKibben型人工筋肉を用いた腕上げ補助装置の開発

抄録

Overhead work is considered to have a high risk of musculoskeletal disorders, and wearable robots that assist arm movement have been developed, but most of the arm support devices on the market are expensive and have weak assisting power. Against this background, we developed and commercialized an arm support device that uses a gas spring and has as simple a structure as possible. However, due to the characteristics of the gas spring, problems were encountered with difficulty in movement when the device was attached. Therefore, we developed a new arm support device that uses McKibben-type artificial muscles. In addition, a comparison with the gas spring model was conducted. In this paper, we describe the structure of the developed device and the results of evaluation..