Development of upper-limb motion restrictive orthosis for preventing nasogastric tube self-withdrawal

In this research, an upper-limb motion restrictive orthosis was developed to prevent nasogastric tube self-withdrawal which happens frequently on nursing field. While these functional orthosis were necessary to ensure the safety of patients, sometimes it causes problems that physical harm and mental harm. One of the factors that cause these negative effects is an excessive restriction of patients. Therefore, this paper proposed a new functional orthosis which prevents fingertip's attainment to the nose with minimum operation limit, by controlling the maximum elbow-bending angle according to the shoulder-bending angle. This effect can be expected to prevent nasogastric tube self-withdrawal without excessive restriction. They are associated with the intermittent stopper with a fabric belt. By measuring myoelectric potentials and the range of motion, achievement of upper-limb motion control around the nose and decrease in restrained area was confirmed. From these results, it was shown that the nasogastric tube self-withdrawal was prevented using the orthosis. Consequently, it was clarified that the developed orthosis enabled the stress-free upperlimb motion control without excessive restriction in comparison of conventional physical restrains.