Design and Evaluation of a Novel Person Transfer Assist System

Person transfer is a major problem for nursing in home and clinical, and this problem is becoming more prominent with the development of aging society and the change of population structure. In this article, a novel person transfer assist system named E-Pat (Easy-Patient Transfer), which can meet the transfer needs of the patient between beds, has been designed and analyzed. The importance and originality of this study are that it explores a theoretical design method for device to enhance patient comfortably when transferred, and put it into practice. The main tasks completed in this article include: (1) a prototype of the device is designed based on the principle of relative static contact point theory. In addition, the corresponding relationship between the human body pressure and the insertion angle is proposed, which provides a theoretical basis for the optimization of the mechanism; (2) based on STM32 (STMicroelectronics 32-bits Microcontroller) chip, the hardware circuit part of the device is designed. According to the transfer environment requirements of the device, the synchronization control algorithm of the device is designed and the experiment is carried out; (3) the performance evaluation of the device is carried out by means of Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), through the research of a group of 30 volunteers, the performance of the system has been evaluated accurately, which provides a reference for the industrialization of the prototype. The whole research of this article proves that this kind of person transfer assist system has good performance, it can also reduce the burden of caregivers.