Development of wrist support mechanism for muscle weakness person to work on desk work

This paper proposes a wrist support device for a muscular weakness person that compensates a hand weight by supporting his/her wrist. Muscle strength of muscular dystrophy patients gradually decreases from their trunk. In order to maintain the level of residual functions, they must actively move their muscular weakness parts. Conventional support systems passively assist their forearm and upper limbs motion to conduct daily activities by themselves. However, few device do not support wrist motion. So they cannot move their hands freely. In order to perform daily work their hands, we focuses on compensation of the hand weight. Our wrist support devices compensate the gravity of hand weight for load reduction on a wrist joint by using a counter weight mechanism. Through experiments supposed to conduct detailed task on the desk, we measured the activity of upper arm muscle with BEP signal. Then we confirmed that our device can compensate the wrist motion during reaching task.