| dc.description.abstract | With the prevalence of the concept of health preservation, the public’s acceptance of traditional Chinese medicine has increased, and the clinical therapy using acupuncture is increasing. To prevent human error, respond to the trend of telemedicine, and overcome the limited medical efficacy of the current acupuncture device with fixed needle insertion depth, an automatic acupuncture assistive device was designed. With the appliance of 3D printing, the design only weighed less than 500gw which was compliant with the requirements of remote medical portability. Connecting the force sensor FSR402 (Interlink Electronics, Camarillo, America) and a 5.1kΩ resistor in series to form a voltage divider circuit, and using the development board Linklt (MediaTek, Hsinchu, Taiwan) to measure the voltage would derive the rate of force change. While inserting the needle, the device was automatically stopped for a rate of force change greater than 15gw. At the same time, a counter was designed to estimate the depth. When the depth exceeded 20mm without detecting a rate of force change greater than 15gw, the automatic acupuncture assistive device entered the safe mode and rose the needle holder. To test the performance of the assistive device, acupuncture experiments were carried out 20 times with a three-layer Dermis-Subcutaneous Tissue-Muscle simulated tissue prepared with agar 4.8%w/v-gelatin 2%w/v-agar 5.2%w/v. In the experiments, the needle tip was successfully stopped at the subcutaneous tissue and muscle layer 18 times. This automatic acupuncture assistive device could correctly detect the rate of force change to perform corresponding operations for achieving the expected results. In the future, the automatic acupuncture assistive device can be innovated using improved mechanical design of hardware to make its operation more precise and more user-friendly. | en_US |