A powered glove is under development for spinal cord injury patients. The glove system is composed of three parts, a glove part to be worn by the user, a controller and a sensor to detect user's command. The glove part is basically made of leather therefore it is quite soft, light and comfortable to wear. An original sensor that detects user's intentional chewing is applied to this glove system as an interface. User can open and close his/her fingers through command signal given by gentle chewing action. Finger exercises based on user's intention has been demonstrated in evaluation tests. The detail of the glove system prototyped and its test results are reported.

An electrical prehension orthosis is under development to support daily activity of cervical spinal cord injury patients. The prehension orthosis has an electric motor to open/close user's fingers, the second and the third fingers, toward a thumb fixed at opposite position. The prehension orthosis also has a unique interface for controlling it. The interface is a sensor to detect deformation (swelling) of human body surface. In this study this sensor is used to detect activity of mastication muscle. The activity of mastication muscle can be obtained by using this sensor because the mastication muscle always swells as it acts. The sensor is fixed at the user's head by using a belt and detects user's efforts for chewing. User can operate the electrical prehansion orthosis through gentle chewing even at the bimanual-handling tasks. Excellent operability of fingers has been demonstrated by a target user. The details of the system and results of evaluation tests are reported in this paper.

For the physically impaired, it can be said that assistive devices are an important part of their body. Therefore, assistive devices are required to be user friendly, safe, and rehable for the person who uses them. As well, there are variety of demands including good appearance, no noise, and ease of wearing it. Shpae memory alloy's super-elastic property and shape memory property are beneficial in fitting to the human body movement. They have been already applied to various products including catheters, stents, and intramedullary nails, and are expected to be widely utilized for assistive devices for the physically impaired. Focusing on assistive devices for the hand, which especially delicate movement is required by the human body, we challenged for development of a power-assested glove using shape-memory alloy and successfully created a more silent, compact and lightweight device compared to conventional products. This device can be operated by heating the shape-memory alloy electrically. Also, adopting electric control as the method of controlling allows the device to be controlled by acomputer.