Design and Performance Evaluation of a Home-Based Automatic Acupoint Identification and Treatment System

Acupuncture can be effective in relieving pain and reducing drug dependence and abuse caused by chronic pain. However, the cumulative effect of acupuncture requires patients to undergo multiple treatments, which limits its use due to time and economic costs. Currently, existing acupuncture devices include acupoint identification and acupoint stimulation devices. The identification and stimulation functions are separated for these two classes of devices. They were unable to locate the acupoint automatically and required a professional acupuncturist to perform the procedure. Although acupuncture robots that can simultaneously identify the acupoints and initiate treatment are under development, the technology is not yet mature that it is currently not available for general use. To address these issues, we developed an automatic system that combines the identification of acupoints and the administration of treatment. The system is designed to assist users without any knowledge of acupuncture in the management of chronic pain at home. We conducted tests to evaluate the performance of the system in terms of resistance detection accuracy, electroacupuncture accuracy, and acupoint identification test. The results demonstrate that the system significantly improves the accuracy of locating acupoints, indicating its suitability for daily home use as an effective approach to managing chronic pain