A meal supporting system for peoples who cannot eat food by themselves has been developed in our laboratory. A few commercial products of such system are found in the field of rehabilitation, however safe and comfortability of system haven’t been considered adequately. Therefore, meal support system haven’t been prevalent yet. In this study, satisfaction level of system was improved by finding problems of commercial products. The improved system has the following concepts: “safety”, “reliability”, “comfortable” and “sense of eating by themselves”. In order to remove the fear against the spoon approaching to user’s mouth, simple motion of 2 degree-of-freedom was adapted, so that the locus of spoon became predictable. Risk of spoon collision to the user’s face was excluded by taking the structural motion limitation in this system. Finally, user tests were conducted to evaluate this meal supporting system. The result of the evaluation test based on 7 requirement for meal supporting manipulators proved the validity of our concept on the system, and showed a guiding principle of the development for next stage.

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The authors designed and produced a low cost device for linear drive system composed by two plate magnets unit and ferromagnetic pole-piece based on magnetic gear design. The linear drive system was succeeded in driving with gear ratio 1/3, and this gear ratio was equal to the ratio of drive magnet length to driven magnet length. The Neodymium magnet (N45) was employed here, and the basic plate magnet was square in shape and 10mm in length and width, 5mm in thickness. The drive load increased under both of large thickness of magnet and small drive speed. But it was clear that maximum drive load decided by two optimum parameter of air gap between plate magnet and ferromagnetic pole piece, and width of ferromagnetic pole piece. Though there was a large difference 21.3% of gear ratio between designed and measured caused by cogging force, the measured maximum transmission normal load was 46.5N under gear ratio 1/3, driving speed 5m/min, thickness of magnet 15mm and air gap 4mm.

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There is a possibility that when stroke happens, motor dysfunction occurs. Finger paralysis is one of the symptoms of the motor dysfunction. If paralysis is left untreated, muscle contracture will develop. Therefore, it is necessary to exercise the muscles around the joints of the paralyzed limp portion on daily basis. In this paper, we consider a finger contracture prevention device using delicate pneumatic actuator. First, we have fabricated curving pneumatic rubber actuator to be utilized in the finger contracture prevention device. Then, we have developed a device which operates using two actuators that push fingers out from the palm side. The size of the device is 106mm × 100mm × 42mm. Force generated by the device could be obtained 6N.

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