Improvement of a Lightweight Power Assist Suit for Nursing Care

Abstract—In this paper, for the purpose of practical use of the power assist suit, the overalls type power assist suit developed in our previous study was improved. The knee pad type power assist suit termed “Cool Vest” was newly developed, and verification experiments were carried out. By wearing the developed assist suit, the muscular load decreased 46% at the maximum in the case of lifting and taking down the 30kg object and decreased 43% at the maximum in the case of transferring the 20kg object by turning around. In addition, air supplying method to the artificial muscle was also improved. An air recycling system and an air generation system were proposed, and evaluation experiments were executed. As results, the number of times which can be used for assisting the transfer work increased from 5 times to 7 times by using these air supplying systems.