抄録
When a care taker assists many handicapped people, the person sometimes feels backache because of holding up motion. Therefore, in order to heal the pain, some care takers attach a protection belt to lumbar part. However, since the compliance of the belt is constant, it is difficult to bend the waist to assist elderly people. In this paper, we propose a new type of actuator to apply to protection belt. The actuator has a structure that a sponge is covered with silicon rubber. Thus, it is possible to control stiffness of the actuator according to user’s posture. From some experimental results, the effectiveness of the actuator is clarified.
