Development of the Low-Cost Lightweight Exoskeleton System that Enables Social Interaction Activities in Quadriplegic Patients

Improving the quality-of-life of quadriplegic patients is the most important feature for assistive technology. Despite the availability of advanced assistive technologies and robotic exoskeleton systems, their high cost, invasiveness, and usefulness can make them difficult to incorporate into daily activities. Our research group have developed a tracer-free Multifunctional intraORal Assistive technology (MORA) to enable various input modalities through tongue motions to access computers, wheelchairs, and smartphones. We now approach the development of a wearable robotic sleeve that uses the MORA system to allow a quadriplegic user to control their arm. Our design, the Kinematically Assistive Robotic Arm (KARA), focused on low-cost (less than $500), is an easy-to-mount exoskeleton device that can aid the user physically express within social interactions, thus ultimately benefiting their emotional and mental recovery as well as rehabilitation effects. In this study, we introduce our preliminary robotic exoskeleton system with electrical, mechanical, and software designs. We validated our system by performing four social interaction activities: thumbs up, point finger, raise hand, and hand shacking tasks, using the KARA system. As a results of this validation, the KARA system was able to perform all four tasks with a time deviation of 3.39% and a performance accuracy of 90%. This exoskeleton system can provide a tool to control their paralyzed limbs for social interaction activities with their intention. This system can be easily mounted on the wheelchair and ultimately applied to the tracer-free tongue-based assistive technology for the quadriplegic patients to improve the quality-of-life.