Interaction Force Estimation for Quantitative Comfort Evaluation of an Eating Assistive Device

Abstract

Robots» usage in the fields of human support and healthcare is wide-spreading. Robotic devices to assist humans in the self-feeding task have been developed to help patients with limited mobility in the upper limbs but the acceptance of these robots has been limited. In this work, we investigate how to quantitatively evaluate the comfort of an eating assistive device by estimating the interaction forces between the human and the robot when eating. We experimentally verify our concept with a commercially-available eating assistive device and a human subject. The evaluation results demonstrate the feasibility of our approach.