Design and Feasibility Study of Assistive Robotic Arm for Orthopedically Handicapped Individuals

Abstract

Individuals with physical disabilities struggle with problems such as not being able to access different services in their daily lives and being dependent on their external environment due to their disability. It is possible to enhance the problems related to congenital or acquired orthopedic disability in the human body by designing comprehensive and suitable technologies. The primary aspects of this paper are to design and implement a robotic arm model for disabled individuals who cannot use their arms. The existing studies in the literature fail to propose easily controllable and flexible designed robotic arm models for orthopedically handicapped individuals. Therefore, this study makes a major contribution to the literature by eliminating the limitations such as dysfunction in the arm of the disabled individuals and to make easier their daily life with such as human-robot interaction and assistant modules. In the design process, Autodesk Fusion 360 was used to model the prototype of the proposed system and open-sourced single-board computers such Raspberry Pi and Arduino Mega and sensors were used to develop the hardware unit. The proposed model was tested and implemented in the laboratory with the peer assessment method, and the results demonstrate that model ready for industrial production stage. We believe that this study will enhance the life quality of individuals with orthopedically handicapped and reduce their dependence on the environment in their daily life. Also, this paper sheds new light into new projects and research for designing assistive technologies for orthopedically handicapped individuals.