Knowledge Bank

The purpose of this research is to design and fabricate a neck support with massage function by applying a soft robot mechanism. Soft robot is fabricated by soft materials and can achieve certain shape deformation under actuations. The application of soft robot in the neck support enables its ability for individual adjustment and even massages function to improve comfort and alleviate fatigue. It has much lighter weight compared to those made of hard materials. In addition, applying the soft robot mechanism also allows lower manufacturing cost. The prototype design was validate by finite element analysis prior the actual fabrication to determine the feasibility for the design concept. A down scale prototype was fabricated first for practice and it was tested for concept validation. The full scale prototype was fabricated but it is not functional due to errors from manufacturing process. Future work will be focused on re-fabrication of full scale prototype and optimization for the neck support.