Easy Human Interface for Severely Handicapped Persons and Application for Eating Assist Robot

This paper proposes an easy human interface device to operate an assist robot for a severely handicapped person. A quadriplegic patient can move a mouse pointer on a personal computer display using a head space pointer, and can click it with the newly designed input device which uses patient´s cheek movement. The input device uses a fiber sensor to detect the patient´s cheek movement. The human interface was applied to operate an eating assist robot. The evaluation experiments have been conducted in cooperation with a quadriplegic patient