Electric wheelchairs are designed to aid paraplegics. Unfortunately, these
can not be used by persons with higher degree of impairment, such as
quadriplegics, i.e. persons that, due to age or illness, can not move any of
the body parts, except of the head. Medical devices designed to help them are
very complicated, rare and expensive. In this paper a microcontroller system
that enables standard electric wheelchair control by head motion is
presented. The system comprises electronic and mechanic components. A novel
head motion recognition technique based on accelerometer data processing is
designed. The wheelchair joystick is controlled by the system’s mechanical
actuator. The system can be used with several different types of standard
electric wheelchairs. It is tested and verified through an experiment
performed within this paper
