Control strategy for the massage chair based on human skin elasticity

Recently, a lot of people use massage chair. However, a current massage chair has only realized the movement programed beforehand. Generally, a professional masseur´s massage process is that a human skin elasticity is estimated by palpate, and a impressed force is decided depending on the estimated elasticity. Then, this paper newly proposes the control strategy of the similar professional masseur´s process. The elasticity of user´s massage part is estimated by the displacement, the velocity, and the impressed force of the massage unit in the proposed method. Afterwards, the appropriately impressed force is decided depending on the estimated elasticity, and the decided impressed force is realized by the impedance control. The appropriate massage is realized for everyone by the proposed method. The possibility of these techniques was confirmed by the simulation and experiment, and the utility of the proposed method was confirmed by comparing with the conventional one.