DESIGN OF AIR SEAT CUSHION ORTHOSIS FOR PLEGIA

The design of an air seat cushion for preventing decubitus ulcer includes many design factors such as the even distribution of interface pressure, the minimization of mean and peak interface pressure values, and the reduction of interface shear force and pressure gradient. It involves the anatomic condition of plegia's buttock as well as air pressure in air cells of cushion. As a result, a suitable design of the cushion satisfying the all requirements is a difficult problem. Therefore, an appropriate and effective numerical tool to develop an air cushion orthosis is required. The purpose of the present study was to develop an air seat cushion orthosis having optimized air cells for evenly distributed interface pressure between the buttock and cushion surface. For the purpose, an advanced finite element (FE) model for the design of air cushion was developed. Since the interface pressure and shear force behavior, as well as stress analyses were primary concern, a FE air cell model was developed and verified by the experiments. Then, the interactions of two cells were checked. Also, the human part of the developed numerical model includes every material property and geometry related to buttock and femoral parts. For construction of dimension data of buttock and femoral parts, CT scans were performed. A commercial FE program was employed for the simulation representing the seating process on the orthosis. Then, sensitive analyses were performed with varying design parameters. A set of optimal design parameters was found satisfying the design criteria of the orthosis. The results were utilized to produce a prototype of the orthosis. Experimentally, the buttock interface pressure distributions from the optimized and previous ones were compared. The new seat orthosis showed a significantly improved interface pressure characteristics compared to the most popular one in the market. The new orthosis will be used for the development of the AI(artificial intelligent) controlled seat orthosis fur prevention of decubitus ulcer fur various plegic patients and the elderly.