Design and analysis of a soft bellow-based robot for dysphagia rehabilitation

As the population ages, the incidence of diseases such as stroke is increasing, leading to a growing number of patients with dysphagia or difficulty swallowing. Dysphagia directly affects the hydration and nutritional intake, potentially leading to serious complications such as aspiration pneumonia, severely threatening patients' health and quality of life. Currently, the rehabilitation of swallowing function mainly relies on therapists to conduct swallowing training for patients. However, the high incidence and long duration of swallowing rehabilitation training pose a burden on the patients and medical resources. There remains a gap in the robotic devices for swallowing rehabilitation. To address this gap, this paper proposes a soft bellow-shaped robot for dysphagia rehabilitation. One mode of the rehabilitation training, where the therapist manipulates the throat to move horizontally, is selected to mimic. This robot simulates the force and displacement applied by the therapist's fingertip during dysphagia rehabilitation. First, swallowing training data were collected and analyzed to understand the variations in displacement and force applied by therapists' fingertips on the throat. Based on this analysis, the technical requirements for the swallowing rehabilitation robot were summarized. Following these requirements, we designed a physical prototype of the pneumatic bellow-shaped robot. The robot simulates the fingertip movement on both sides of the throat through the linear elongation and contraction of the bellows. The performance of the soft bellows was then characterized, verifying that its output force and displacement meet the technical requirements. This characterization lays a foundation for the modeling and control of the displacement and force of the robot.