Preliminary Design of an Active Stabilization Assistive Eating Device for People Living with Movement Disorders

This paper presents the development of a new active assistive eating device, which aims to stabilize the movements of people living with movement disorders, such as spasticity and ataxia. Many people living with upper-body incapacities are unable to eat on their own, due to movement disorders (ex. tremors, spastic motions, lack of muscular tone), resulting from various ailments like Cerebral palsy, Parkinson's disease, Dystonia, Multiple sclerosis, strokes and Muscular dystrophy. Our past work focused on the development of a purely mechanical device, which involved damping of the system via passive mechanical dampers. This paper extends said work by using active stabilization of user movements. The active assistance enables the design of intelligent algorithms that can assist human movements more efficiently. This active version has the benefits of being easily adjustable; the level of damping can be adjusted in real-time, depending on the user movement; different control modes are offered, and the guiding of user movements is also allowed. Firstly, the mechanical design of the device is presented, followed by the damping arrangement, the electronic design, the control algorithms and finally, the preliminary experiments are mentioned.