| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺北科技大學 === 製造科技研究所 === 93 === While it is an easy task for a normal Asian person to have a meal with chopsticks, it becomes a pretty tough task for a person of hand impairment. For example, some of patients of spinal cord injury (SCI) can not hold eating utensils, therefore, they need someone to feed them. It is very obvious that the assistant devices are very important in a way to improve the patients’ independence and to take a load off the helper’s heavy duty. It could not only raise the life quality of patients, but also strengthen patients’ confidence. In addition, it could also reduce the high cost of daily care to benefit everyone. Currently, Taiwan is highly relied on the imported assistant devices to meet the needs. Besides its expensive cost, the imported assistant devices may not be quite suitable to the patients here. That is the motivation for this study to develop suitable assistant devices of holding chopsticks for a person of hand impairment.
The work completed in this study includes: (1) Review and analyze the related literature, products and patents on the eating assistant devices. (2) Study the path of using chopsticks to pick up food from dish to mouth, including movements and postures. The path is taken as reference for synthesizing the mechanism. (3) Generate the feasible mechanisms systematically by using Creative Mechanism Design Methodology. (4) Establish a mathematical model of the kinematic analysis and mechanical advantage analysis for the feasible mechanisms. (5) Synthesize the dimensions of the mechanisms and obtain their optimum dimensions by MSC.ADAMS software. (6) Use MSC.ADAMS software to simulate and verify their feasibilities. (7) manufacture and test the prototypes.
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