Remote treatment with mouth opening and closing training robot

Abstract

Describes remote training with a 6-degrees-of-freedom (DOF) parallel robot that is designed for training patients in mouth opening and closing. Rehabilitation for patients who have problems with their jaw joint, mastication muscles or other organs concerned with chewing food has been done primarily based on their doctor's qualitative experience and technique. Conventional mouth-opening apparatus (such as wooden screws, bite blocks and clothes-pin-type apparatus) only increases the mouth-opening distance and does not have any actuators, sensors and/or control systems. Moreover, during therapy, the quantitative data is unknown, inspite of its importance for the standardization of mouth-opening/closing training. The mouth-opening/closing training robot WY-5R (Wadaseda Yamanashi-5 Refined) realized the remote training via an ISDN line. As a result of remote therapy using WY-5R, the patient's mouth-opening distance increased.