A soft actuator based expressive mask for facial paralyzed patients

The face is such a salient feature of a person that it plays a crucial role in physical, psychological, and emotional makeup. Hence facial paralysis, which is the loss of voluntary muscle movement of one or both sides of the face, apart from making physical disturbances, can also be an alarming and depressing event in onepsilas life. Although therapeutically and surgery based treatment methods are available, they can work on temporary paralysis only. Facial uplifts done on permanently paralyzed patients will only attempt to reduce the facial asymmetry of a neutral faces. Despite facial paralysis been fairly common, over the years only a very limited amount of effort has been put in to the development of supporting systems for facial paralyzed patients and it is also virtually zero in the robotics field. This paper discusses a novel method; an expressive mask based on robotics technology while giving strong references to human anatomy. The developed robot mask uses artificial muscles based on soft actuators as they can closely model natural muscles while producing silent actuations. With 6 artificial muscles, tests were done on one side of the face of a healthy human. We also explain the suitability of proposed artificial muscles through preliminary experiments and conclude by underlining its suitability as a worthy candidate.