Remote treatment with mouth opening and closing training robot

This paper describes the remote training with 6 degrees of freedom (DOF) parallel robot that is designed for the mouth-opening and -closing training. The rehabilitation for the patient who have problems on the jaw joint, mastication muscles, or other organs concerning the food chewing have been done primarily based on the doctor's qualitative experience and technique. Conventional mouth opening apparatuses (such as wooden screws, bite blocks and clothespins-type apparatus) only increases the mouth-opening distance and do not have the actuators, sensors, and/or control systems. Moreover, during therapy, the quantitative data is unknown in spite of its importance for the standardization of mouth-opening and -closing training. Mouth-opening and -closing training robot WY-5R (Waseda Yamanashi-5 Refined) realized the remote training via ISDN line. As a result of remote therapy using WY-5R, the patient's mouth-opening distance increased.