Assistive Feeding System: Design and Evaluation

Old people and patients with limited or complete motor impairment had always face difficulty in their daily life task in which most important and frequent is eating meals, such people need assistant like nurse to feed them. In this paper we worked on an assistive feeding system based on 6 Degree of Freedom fixed base open-source robotic arm with active assistance. The manipulator is 3D printed by fused deposition modelling technique using PLA + material and a counterweight mechanism is introduced to reduce the motor torque requirements hence reducing the power consumption of the system. The system is divided into 2 sub-systems which are hybrid-vision system to get location of mouth of the person to feed and, scooping and delivery system which uses manipulator and control system to feed the food. The system is completely embedded on raspberry pi with wireless access for user and programmer. Finally, we discuss the results of our system and limitations in the methodologies used.