Research and Development of Chinese Medical Massage Robot

A Chinese medical massage robot is developed according to the clinical requirement of Chinese medical massage and health care,especially,for the rehabilitation of degenerative disease and chronic disease of middle-aged and aged people.The robot system's mechanical architecture,control system,and other functional modules are presented.Firstly,the model of typical Chinese medical massage manipulations is built with the technologies of sensor information fusion,human-machine interaction,and 3D simulation.Then,an architecture combining series structure and parallel structure is applied to the robot system,and a massage mechanical hand that can accomplish various massage manipulations is developed.The Chinese medical massage robot adopts a vision system for acupoint positioning to track the patient's body.It can execute ten massage manipulations of finger-/palm-kneading,finger-/palm-rolling,pressing,pushing,tapping on lumbar and pinching, vibrating,patting on lower limb.Apart from acupoint memory,it can ensure the patients' safety by adjusting the massage frequency, amplitude and velocity according to the real-time detected physiological signals(heartbeat,blood pressure,etc.) and the massage pressure,even stopping operation when necessary.The effectiveness of the system is demonstrated by clinical trial of the lumbar disc protrusion therapy of middle-aged and aged people.