Mechanical design of a new device to assist eating in people with movement disorders.

Many people living with neurological disorders, such as cerebral palsy, stroke, muscular dystrophy or dystonia, experience upper limb impairments (muscle spasticity, loss of selective motor control, muscle weakness or tremors) and are unable to eat independently. This article presents the development of a new device to assist with eating, aimed at stabilizing the movement of people who have movement disorders. The design was guided by insights gathered through focus groups, with occupational therapists and engineers, about the challenges faced by individuals who have movement disorders and difficulty in eating autonomously. The proposed assistive device prototype is designed to be fixed on a table and to support a spoon. The mechanism is designed so that the spoon maintains a position parallel to the ground for the user. Dampers and inertia allow stabilizing the user's motion. A preliminary trial with five individuals living with cerebral palsy is presented to assess the prototype's performance and to guide future iterations of the prototype. Task completion time generally decreased and movement fluidity generally improved when using the assistive device prototype. The prototype showed good potential in stabilizing the spoon for the user and improving movement fluidity.

Preliminary Design of an Active Stabilization Assistive Eating Device for People Living with Movement Disorders.

This paper presents the development of a new active assistive eating device, which aims to stabilize the movements of people living with movement disorders, such as spasticity and ataxia. Many people living with upper-body incapacities are unable to eat on their own, due to movement disorders (ex. tremors, spastic motions, lack of muscular tone), resulting from various ailments like Cerebral palsy, Parkinson's disease, Dystonia, Multiple sclerosis, strokes, and Muscular dystrophy). Our past work focused on the development of a purely mechanical device, which involved damping of the system via passive mechanical dampers. This paper extends said work by using active stabilization of user movements. The active assistance enables the design of intelligent algorithms that can assist human movements more efficiently. This active version has the benefits of being easily adjustable; the level of damping can be adjusted in real-time, depending on the user movement; different control modes are offered, and the guiding of user movements is also allowed. Firstly, the mechanical design of the device is presented, followed by the damping arrangement, the electronic design, the control algorithms and finally, the preliminary experiments are mentioned.