Design of a Wearable Restraint Device to Simulate Hand Strength in the Elderly

Abstract

Due to the improvement of the health and medical systems people’s average life is increasing And with the low birth rate Taiwan has entered "aged society" and the elderly population will exceed 20% soon Aging society is a challenge for many countries around the world And that will influence the economic development and industrial pattern of the society The ageing suit can let young people experience the inconvenience of movement caused by muscles degeneration of the elderly Ageing suit is a nice teaching aid for the elderly service industry and medical institutions And it can be used to promote senior education However the common experience equipment restricts the hands only by the restraint Ageing suit usually has not designed the value of the grip and torsion by muscle strength after the aging of the hand As a restraint device based on the hand simulation restraint device for the elderly This research collected data on the grip strength and the torque of the elderly and young people from reference data Then change the initial position of the position of spring compression by turning the nut position on the adjusting device And we can pull the device with fingers to produce different compressions of the spring So that the wearer can simulate the inconvenience of the elderly and experience the feeling of different aging after wearing the wearable restraint device In this study we use the grip strength experiment and the torsion strength experiment to evaluate the limitation effect of the wearable restraint device of the elderly The experiment recruited 22 young participant for the experimentation There are 11 males and 11 females The experiment was carried out through the experiment under normal conditions of the participant and under the conditions of wearing the wearable restraint device We found that wearing the device can reduce the hand grip strength and the torque strength when wearing this wearable restraint device And we can make adjustments to simulate different age groups grip strength of the elderly

Date of Award	2021
Original language	English
Supervisor	Tsai-Jeon Huang (Supervisor)