Development of Oral - Rehabilitation Robot

It is well known that the massage therapy is useful for the rehabilitation of various diseases (i.e. oral health problems, etc.). Although various apparatus have been developed for the massage of the torso and limbs, there is still little knowledge about their real effectiveness. However; thanks to recent advances in robot technology (such as actuators, sensors, control system, etc.), more effective advanced tools to provide massage therapy can be conceived. For this purpose, authors have proposed the development of a robotic system that provides massage therapy as an advanced evaluation tool to determine objectively the effectiveness of the therapy. In particular, a novel rehabilitation robot has been designed to provide massage of the maxillofacial region as a therapy to patients with dry mouth, etc. As a result of our research, in this year, we have succeeded in developing the Waseda-Asahi Oral-Rehabilitation No.1 (WAO-1). WAO-1 is composed by two 6-degree of freedom arms with plungers attached at their end-effector. In order to provide the massage, a virtual compliance control has been implemented to control the positioning and the applied force by the plunger. Preliminary experiments were carried out to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed system. In particular, WAO-1 was programmed to provide massage on two tissues: parotid gland and masseter muscle. From the experimental results, we could detect the effectiveness of stimulating the production of saliva, and increasing the skin temperature as well as the size of masseter muscle on volunteers after providing the massage with WAO-1.