Application of advanced engineering technologies to medical and rehabilitation fields

The words "Japan syndrome" can now be heard increasingly through the media. Facing the approach of an elderly-dominated society. Robot Technology (RT) is expected to play an important role in Japan's medical, rehabilitation, and daily support fields. The industrial robot, which has already spread through the world with a great success in certain isolated environments by doing the work which is specialized for the thing with the hard known characteristic. By comparison, in the medical and rehabilitation fields, environments always change intricately, and individual characteristics differ from person to person. Furthermore, there are many times when a robot will be asked to directly interact with people. Moreover, the relation between a robot and a person turns into a relation which should involve contact flexibly according to a situation, and also turns into a relation which should avoid contact. In our group, we have so far developed practical rehabilitation and medical robots which can respond to difficulties such as environmental change and individual specificity. In developing rehabilitation robots, it is especially important to consider intuitive operability and individual differences. In addition, in developing medical robots, it is important to replace the experimental knowledge of surgeons to the mechanical quantitative properties. In this article, we introduce some practical examples of rehabilitation and medical robots interweaving several detailed technologies we have so far developed.