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Hands-on Project in a Modeling and Simulation Course: Assistive Device for Elderly

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Conference

2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Minneapolis, MN

Publication Date

August 23, 2022

Start Date

June 26, 2022

End Date

June 29, 2022

Conference Session

Project Based and Experiential Learning in Manufacturing

Page Count

12

DOI

10.18260/1-2--41847

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/41847

Download Count

294

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Paper Authors

biography

Tumkor Serdar University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown

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Serdar Tumkor is an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown. Dr. Tumkor has more than 30 years of experience in education, having taught at Stevens Institute of Technology and Istanbul Technical University.
He has been lecturing Manufacturing Processes, Machine Design, Engineering Design, and Computer-Aided Technical Drawing courses. He specialized in design and simulation tools for engineering education, CAD/CAM, and 3D Printing applications for mechanical design and manufacturing.

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William Fetrow University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown

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Abstract

One common issue among old-age people is a loss of mobility or strength of their joints. This problem can ultimately inhibit them from bending over to pick things up from hard-to-reach places. A popular item that can help these people combat this issue is the long-reach grabber. This mechanism has a handle with a lever, long arm, and soft grippers at the end that open and close when you release or squeeze the lever to grab objects. The grabber can tremendously help someone that is struggling due to a lack of mobility. However, what if the person using this device also has weakness in their hands and cannot hold the grippers closed? It is possible to keep the gripper closed with a bistable compliant mechanism. This redesigned device can achieve the same function but will be better since continuously squeezing the lever is not necessary anymore. It will make it more user-friendly than before for a person with lower grip strength. A bistable compliant mechanism only works better for the elderly if the forces are low to activate the locking mechanism. Dynamic analysis in the CAD system determines the forces needed to open and close the bistable mechanism to verify its feasibility and its comfort level. The first step in modeling the mechanism is to create a model of the grabber with standard joints. This step is followed by converting the standard joints into compliant ones. Many different types of joints are available to convert the common joints to compliant joints. The compliant joints are kept simple to avoid modifications in 3D printing. After the dynamic simulation of the mechanism, a working 3-D printed model will be made to test the functionality of the newly designed mechanism. This paper describes a student project in a dynamic modeling and simulation class. The design process facilitates computer-aided dynamic modeling and simulation approach and its verification. In this study, the well-known long-reach gripper design is improved to make it user-friendly for the elderly. The converted compliant to the standard joint mechanism regarding function with the added self-locking feature is designed and simulated.

Serdar, T., & Fetrow, W. (2022, August), Hands-on Project in a Modeling and Simulation Course: Assistive Device for Elderly Paper presented at 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Minneapolis, MN. 10.18260/1-2--41847

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