IoT-based smart wheelchair system for physically impaired person / Muhammad Afiq Mohd Aizam... [et al.]

Disabled persons usually require an assistant to help them in their daily routines especially for their mobility. The limitation of being physically impaired affects the quality of life in executing their daily routine especially the ones with a wheelchair. Pushing a wheelchair has its own side effects for the user especially the person with hands and arms impairments. This paper aims to develop a smart wheelchair system integrated with home automation. With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), a smart wheelchair can be operated using voice command through the Google assistant Software Development Kit (SDK). The smart wheelchair system and the home automation of this study were powered by Raspberry Pi 3 B+ and NodeMCU, respectively. Voice input commands were processed by the Google assistant Artificial Intelligence Yourself (AIY) to steer the movement of wheelchair. Users were able to speak to Google to discover any information from the website. For the safety of the user, a streaming camera was added on the wheelchair. An improvement to the wheelchair system that was added on the wheelchair is its combination with the home automation to help the impaired person to control their home appliances through Blynk application. Observations on three voice tones (low, medium and high) of voice command show that the minimum voice intensity for this smart wheelchair system is 68.2 dB. Besides, the user is also required to produce a clear voice command to increase the system accuracy

Head-movement interface for wheelchair driving based on inertial sensors

Powered wheelchairs provide the only means of mobility for many people with severe motor disabilities. For those with both lower and upper limbs impairment, available interfaces may be either impossible or very difficult to use, as well as not very efficient. In this paper we propose an egocentric interface based on inertial sensors placed on the user's head. This interface is based on head movements that provide continuous direction and speed commands to steer the wheelchair, and allows an initial null-position of the head according to the natural posture of the user. However, the development of an inertial interface for driving a wheelchair presents two main challenges, namely, (1) the simultaneous movements of the head and the wheelchair, each one with its own coordinate system, and (2) the free unrestricted movement of the head. Therefore, the two coordinate systems need to be combined and several safety features are required to only ensure admissible commands. In this paper we describe the overall implementation and preliminary experiments that show the effectiveness of the proposed solution.This work has been financially supported by the Project B-RELIABLE: PTDC/EEI-AUT/30935/2017 and the Project VITASENIOR-MT: SAICT-POL/23659/2016 | CENTRO-01-0145-FEDER-023659 with FEDER/FNR/OE funding through programs CENTRO2020 and FCT.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Hybrid Head Tracking for Wheelchair Control Using Haar Cascade Classifier and KCF Tracker

Disability may limit someone to move freely, especially when the severity of the disability is high. In order to help disabled people control their wheelchair, head movement-based control is preferred due to its reliability. This paper proposed a head direction detector framework which can be applied to wheelchair control. First, face and nose were detected from a video frame using Haar cascade classfier. Then, the detected bounding boxes were used to initialize Kernelized Correlation Filters tracker. Direction of a head was determined by relative position of the nose to the face, extracted from tracker’s bounding boxes. Results show that the method effectively detect head direction indicated by 82% accuracy and very low detection or tracking failure

Perancangan Pengendalian Kursi Roda Menggunakan Flex Sensor dengan Pemanfaatan Pergerakan Gestur Tangan dengan Metode Agglomerative Hirarchical Clustering

Disabilitas atau penyadang cacat adalah keadaan keterbatasan diri, dapat berupa fisik, kognitif, mental, sensorik, emosional dan lainnya. Penyandang disabilitas, bisa diakibatkan karena kecelakaan, penyakit, bencana alam ataupun akibat cacat pada saat kelahiran sehingga memerlukan alat bantu untuk berjalan. Kursi roda adalah alat yang digunakan untuk membantu orang yang mengalamai kesulitan berjalan, ada beberapa jenis yaitu kursi roda normal atau konvesional dan kursi roda elektrik dengan (joystick). Pemakaian kursi roda konvesional bagi penyadang disabilitas penggunaan tidak efesien dan nyaman. Sementara penyandang disabilitas juga tidak bisa memakai kursi roda elektrik (joystick) jika tidak memiliki jari tangan dan kaki. Oleh karena itu, pada penelitian akan dirancang sebuah sistem pengendalian kursi roda menggunakan flex sensor yang diletakkan pada pergelangan tangan untuk menggerakkan perintah maju, mundur, belok kanan, belok kiri dan berhenti. Metode yang digunakan dalam pengambilan keputusan dan pengolahan data adalah metode Agglomerative Hirarchical Clustering. Hasil pengujian metode didapatkan akurasi 100% dan pada pengujian langsung kekauratan sistem terhadap arah kursi roda didapatkan akurasi sebesar 98,88%. Kata kunci: disabilitas, Kursi Roda, Flex Sensor, Agglomerative Hierachical Clustering

Hybrid wheelchair controller for handicapped and quadriplegic patients

In this dissertation, a hybrid wheelchair controller for handicapped and quadriplegic patient is proposed. The system has two sub-controllers which are the voice controller and the head tilt controller. The system aims to help quadriplegic, handicapped, elderly and paralyzed patients to control a robotic wheelchair using voice commands and head movements instead of a traditional joystick controller. The multi-input design makes the system more flexible to adapt to the available body signals. The low-cost design is taken into consideration as it allows more patients to use this system

Homecare Robotic Systems for Healthcare 4.0: Visions and Enabling Technologies

Powered by the technologies that have originated from manufacturing, the fourth revolution of healthcare technologies is happening (Healthcare 4.0). As an example of such revolution, new generation homecare robotic systems (HRS) based on the cyber-physical systems (CPS) with higher speed and more intelligent execution are emerging. In this article, the new visions and features of the CPS-based HRS are proposed. The latest progress in related enabling technologies is reviewed, including artificial intelligence, sensing fundamentals, materials and machines, cloud computing and communication, as well as motion capture and mapping. Finally, the future perspectives of the CPS-based HRS and the technical challenges faced in each technical area are discussed