Characterization of a Meso-Scale Wearable Robot for Bathing Assistance

Bathing and skin care assistance are important and practical tasks when providing care to adults with phys-ical disabilities in healthcare and nursing home settings. Yet, achieving flexible and efficient cleaning tasks on the human body is challenging, since cleaning the body involves direct human-robot physical contact and simple, safe, and effective devices are needed for bathing and hygiene. In this paper, we present a meso-scale wearable robot that can locomote along the human body to assist in cleaning the surface of a limb. We evaluated the cleaning performance of the robot under different scenarios. The experiments on a cylindrical surface (approximating a limb) show that the robot can achieve cleaning surface coverage of over 95% with varying cleaning fabrics. The wearable robot also exhibited cleaning performance of 94% on a human arm and 93% on a manikin torso.