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

Integrating Retrofit IOT Controller With Electric Power System For Manual Wheelchair

Persons with physical injuries and disability are struggling to get through places using the conventional handwheelchair The needs of many people with disabilities can be overcome with powered wheelchair, but some portion of this community is finding it difficult to operate standard powered wheelchair due to its big in size and epensive.. This project developed a smatphone phone-controlled wheelchair along with three types of virtual controller which is Joystick control, D-pad control and Voice control through the wireless communication.. It is also equipped with obstacle (ultrasonic) avoidance notification and microcontroller controls the motor that moved the direction either FRONT, BACKWARD, LEFT and RIGHT. The main objective of this project is to facilitate and increase the movement of people who are handicapped and the ones who are not able to move freely with the implementation of IoT platform where this platform could provide data visualization and able to analyze the wheelchair maintenance management and movement. In additional, this project analyzes distinct IoT monitoring system features, including battery level remaining and temperature control. the concept succesfully developed with integration of microcontroller in which provide desired performance control  of the system to desired output with the synchronization of Internet of Thing feature

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

Future bathroom: A study of user-centred design principles affecting usability, safety and satisfaction in bathrooms for people living with disabilities

Research and development work relating to assistive technology 2010-11 (Department of Health) Presented to Parliament pursuant to Section 22 of the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act 197

Voice-activated wheelchair: An affordable solution for individuals with physical disabilities

The Low-Cost Voice Controlled Wheelchair with Raspberry Pi is an innovative assistive technology designed to improve the mobility and independence of people with disabilities. This research aims to develop a wheelchair system that can be operated using voice commands at an affordable price, making it accessible to a wider range of individuals with limited mobility. The device is built on the Raspberry Pi, a reasonably priced, credit-card-sized computer, and uses an easy-to-use yet efficient voice recognition technique to let users control the wheelchair with their vocal commands. A Raspberry Pi, a microphone, and motor controllers are some of the system's hardware components. The software uses Python programming language and open-source voice recognition technology to recognize voice commands, making it easy for users to navigate their environment independently. The system has been tested on a prototype and has shown promising results in terms of accuracy and reliability. The Low-Cost Voice Controlled Wheelchair with Raspberry Pi can give disabled persons new levels of mobility and independence, enhancing their quality of life and enhancing their capacity to carry out daily tasks

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

Cognitive assisted living ambient system: a survey

The demographic change towards an aging population is creating a significant impact and introducing drastic challenges to our society. We therefore need to find ways to assist older people to stay independently and prevent social isolation of these population. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) provide various solutions to help older adults to improve their quality of life, stay healthier, and live independently for a time. Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) is a field to investigate innovative technologies to provide assistance as well as healthcare and rehabilitation to impaired seniors. The paper provides a review of research background and technologies of AAL