Towards Early Mobility Independence: An Intelligent Paediatric Wheelchair with Case Studies

Standard powered wheelchairs are still heavily dependent on the cognitive capabilities of users. Unfortunately, this excludes disabled users who lack the required problem-solving and spatial skills, particularly young children. For these children to be denied powered mobility is a crucial set-back; exploration is important for their cognitive, emotional and psychosocial development. In this paper, we present a safer paediatric wheelchair: the Assistive Robot Transport for Youngsters (ARTY). The fundamental goal of this research is to provide a key-enabling technology to young children who would otherwise be unable to navigate independently in their environment. In addition to the technical details of our smart wheelchair, we present user-trials with able-bodied individuals as well as one 5-year-old child with special needs. ARTY promises to provide young children with early access to the path towards mobility independence

Overcoming barriers and increasing independence: service robots for elderly and disabled people

This paper discusses the potential for service robots to overcome barriers and increase independence of elderly and disabled people. It includes a brief overview of the existing uses of service robots by disabled and elderly people and advances in technology which will make new uses possible and provides suggestions for some of these new applications. The paper also considers the design and other conditions to be met for user acceptance. It also discusses the complementarity of assistive service robots and personal assistance and considers the types of applications and users for which service robots are and are not suitable

A Low-Cost Tele-Presence Wheelchair System

This paper presents the architecture and implementation of a tele-presence wheelchair system based on tele-presence robot, intelligent wheelchair, and touch screen technologies. The tele-presence wheelchair system consists of a commercial electric wheelchair, an add-on tele-presence interaction module, and a touchable live video image based user interface (called TIUI). The tele-presence interaction module is used to provide video-chatting for an elderly or disabled person with the family members or caregivers, and also captures the live video of an environment for tele-operation and semi-autonomous navigation. The user interface developed in our lab allows an operator to access the system anywhere and directly touch the live video image of the wheelchair to push it as if he/she did it in the presence. This paper also discusses the evaluation of the user experience

Learning Motion Predictors for Smart Wheelchair using Autoregressive Sparse Gaussian Process

Constructing a smart wheelchair on a commercially available powered wheelchair (PWC) platform avoids a host of seating, mechanical design and reliability issues but requires methods of predicting and controlling the motion of a device never intended for robotics. Analog joystick inputs are subject to black-box transformations which may produce intuitive and adaptable motion control for human operators, but complicate robotic control approaches; furthermore, installation of standard axle mounted odometers on a commercial PWC is difficult. In this work, we present an integrated hardware and software system for predicting the motion of a commercial PWC platform that does not require any physical or electronic modification of the chair beyond plugging into an industry standard auxiliary input port. This system uses an RGB-D camera and an Arduino interface board to capture motion data, including visual odometry and joystick signals, via ROS communication. Future motion is predicted using an autoregressive sparse Gaussian process model. We evaluate the proposed system on real-world short-term path prediction experiments. Experimental results demonstrate the system's efficacy when compared to a baseline neural network model.Comment: The paper has been accepted to the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA2018

How a Diverse Research Ecosystem Has Generated New Rehabilitation Technologies: Review of NIDILRR’s Rehabilitation Engineering Research Centers

Over 50 million United States citizens (1 in 6 people in the US) have a developmental, acquired, or degenerative disability. The average US citizen can expect to live 20% of his or her life with a disability. Rehabilitation technologies play a major role in improving the quality of life for people with a disability, yet widespread and highly challenging needs remain. Within the US, a major effort aimed at the creation and evaluation of rehabilitation technology has been the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Centers (RERCs) sponsored by the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research. As envisioned at their conception by a panel of the National Academy of Science in 1970, these centers were intended to take a “total approach to rehabilitation”, combining medicine, engineering, and related science, to improve the quality of life of individuals with a disability. Here, we review the scope, achievements, and ongoing projects of an unbiased sample of 19 currently active or recently terminated RERCs. Specifically, for each center, we briefly explain the needs it targets, summarize key historical advances, identify emerging innovations, and consider future directions. Our assessment from this review is that the RERC program indeed involves a multidisciplinary approach, with 36 professional fields involved, although 70% of research and development staff are in engineering fields, 23% in clinical fields, and only 7% in basic science fields; significantly, 11% of the professional staff have a disability related to their research. We observe that the RERC program has substantially diversified the scope of its work since the 1970’s, addressing more types of disabilities using more technologies, and, in particular, often now focusing on information technologies. RERC work also now often views users as integrated into an interdependent society through technologies that both people with and without disabilities co-use (such as the internet, wireless communication, and architecture). In addition, RERC research has evolved to view users as able at improving outcomes through learning, exercise, and plasticity (rather than being static), which can be optimally timed. We provide examples of rehabilitation technology innovation produced by the RERCs that illustrate this increasingly diversifying scope and evolving perspective. We conclude by discussing growth opportunities and possible future directions of the RERC program

Collaborative Control for a Robotic Wheelchair: Evaluation of Performance, Attention, and Workload

Powered wheelchair users often struggle to drive safely and effectively and in more critical cases can only get around when accompanied by an assistant. To address these issues, we propose a collaborative control mechanism that assists the user as and when they require help. The system uses a multiple–hypotheses method to predict the driver’s intentions and if necessary, adjusts the control signals to achieve the desired goal safely. The main emphasis of this paper is on a comprehensive evaluation, where we not only look at the system performance, but, perhaps more importantly, we characterise the user performance, in an experiment that combines eye–tracking with a secondary task. Without assistance, participants experienced multiple collisions whilst driving around the predefined route. Conversely, when they were assisted by the collaborative controller, not only did they drive more safely, but they were able to pay less attention to their driving, resulting in a reduced cognitive workload. We discuss the importance of these results and their implications for other applications of shared control, such as brain–machine interfaces, where it could be used to compensate for both the low frequency and the low resolution of the user input

Government Response to Raising our sights: services for adults with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities

"This is the Government’s response to Raising our Sights report by Professor Jim Mansell published 19.3.10, commissioned by DH to respond to concerns raised in the consultation for Valuing People Now that adults with complex and multiple needs often do not receive the support they need to live independently." - Pag

Implementation of target tracking in Smart Wheelchair Component System

Independent mobility is critical to individuals of any age. While the needs of many individuals with disabilities can be satisfied with power wheelchairs, some members of the disabled community find it difficult or impossible to operate a standard power wheelchair. This population includes, but is not limited to, individuals with low vision, visual field neglect, spasticity, tremors, or cognitive deficits. To meet the needs of this population, our group is involved in developing cost effective modularly designed Smart Wheelchairs. Our objective is to develop an assistive navigation system which will seamlessly integrate into the lifestyle of individual with disabilities and provide safe and independent mobility and navigation without imposing an excessive physical or cognitive load. The Smart Wheelchair Component System (SWCS) can be added to a variety of commercial power wheelchairs with minimal modification to provide navigation assistance. Previous versions of the SWCS used acoustic and infrared rangefinders to identify and avoid obstacles, but these sensors do not lend themselves to many desirable higher-level behaviors. To achieve these higher level behaviors we integrated a Continuously Adapted Mean Shift (CAMSHIFT) target tracking algorithm into the SWCS, along with the Minimal Vector Field Histogram (MVFH) obstacle avoidance algorithm. The target tracking algorithm provides the basis for two distinct operating modes: (1) a "follow-the-leader" mode, and (2) a "move to stationary target" mode.The ability to track a stationary or moving target will make smart wheelchairs more useful as a mobility aid, and is also expected to be useful for wheeled mobility training and evaluation. In addition to wheelchair users, the caregivers, clinicians, and transporters who provide assistance to wheelchair users will also realize beneficial effects of providing safe and independent mobility to wheelchair users which will reduce the level of assistance needed by wheelchair users