Designing self-feeding system for increasing independence of elders and Parkinson people
This paper describes a customized self-feeding system designed to increase the independence of a elder person or Parkinson patient who is unable to use his/her arm for self-feeding. Besides, the procedures of design and development of the system are also carried out, and other its tasks control manipulator to feed the food to patients based on nutrients management for patients. This system can help patients self-control his meal replacement for the care of a family member or care worker thereby saving a lot of time and effort of caregivers, and, nutritional management software of each meal will allow caregivers understand nutritional information of the patients in the diet which can not change to improve the quality of meals for patients. The self-feeding system is experienced and evaluated with several cases in nursing home to give suitable design. The experimental results show that this self-feeding system provides a viable alternative to assisting independence in self-feeding as measured by ingesting time and nutrition intake. The self-feeding system is operated autonomous by itself and sent food's data and relative information to monitoring computer based on Internet. Besides, the tool of management can analyze the data according to the nutritional standards, and controller control movements of manipulator and automation tray based on health situation and needs of patients.