Development of the Oral Rehabilitation Robot WAO-1

It is well known that the massage therapy is useful for the rehabilitation of various diseases; i.e. oral health problems, etc. Authors have proposed the development of a novel rehabilitation robot designed to provide massage to maxillofacial region (as a therapy to patients with dry mouth, etc.). In this year, we have succeeded in developing the Waseda-Asahi oral-rehabilitation robot No.1 (WAO-1). WAO-1 is composed by two 6-DOF arms with plungers attached at their end-effector. A virtual compliance control has been implemented to control the positioning and the applied force by the plunger during the massage. Preliminary experiments were carried out to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed system. From the experimental results, we could detect the effectiveness of stimulating the production of saliva, and increasing the skin temperature as well as the size of masseter muscle on volunteers after providing the massage with WAO-1.