A new soft pneumatic elbow pad for joint assistance with application to smart campus

This paper presents an assistance equipment of human elbow joint, which aims to help patients who have elbow injury issues in smart campus environment. A new type of soft pneumatic elbow pad (SPEP) which adopted soft material manufacturing technology is presented. Compared with the rigid assistant equipment, the SPEP shows more comfort, smaller equipment size, and convenience of wearing. Meanwhile, three different types of sensors (the air pressure sensor, bending sensor, and force sensor) are used in the SPEP to discover the two important characteristics which are applied. In order to verify the effectiveness of the designed SPEP, two analysis methods are presented. The surface electromyogram signal and the root mean square analysis are used in the first method, which prove that the SPEP could reduce the activity of the muscle and assist power during the elbow movement. Compared with the first method, the second method which is the model of calculation after wearing SPEP can obtain specific value of assisting power in the biceps and olecranon. Thus, the aforementioned methods illustrate the feasibility of the SPEP. Finally, in order to make the SPEP used in daily life, a portable backpack with the control system and the energy system is applied to the field of human assistance equipment.