Transferring-Care Assistance with Robot Suit HAL

Abstract

In the super aged society, it is expected that from now on the physical burden to caregivers will certainly increase. Transferring care-receivers between wheelchairs and beds is one of the heaviest physical labor to caregivers. To reduce the burden of the caregivers, we introduce Robot Suit HAL, which supports and expands the physical capability of humans during the daily activities. Particularly, in this paper we develop the upper half body of the HAL to support the wearer's force at upper limbs. We built a mechanism which locks the backdrivability of the power units of the HAL to assist the movement of the wearer's upper limbs. Through the demonstration of a transferring-care task with the HAL, we confirmed that the physical load on the upper limbs of the wearer was decreased and thus the wearer's trunk inclination angle was reduced, which contributes alleviating the physical load on around the lumber spine of the caregivers as well.