Head & Eye Based Electrical Wheelchair Tracking & Control System

The market for a wheelchair is very wide as more than 600 million people who are suffering from some kind of disability or elderly people are in need of a wheelchair. Many from these people who are suffering from a disability have restricted body movements due to which they cannot use the traditional wheelchair. For people with moderate physical disabilities or long-term diseases as well as the elderly an alternative to a traditional wheelchair is a powered wheelchair, a mobility aided device. In order to tackle different disabilities, there are many different ideas that have been developed for powered wheelchair control like head control, joystick control and sip-puff control. Electric wheelchairs are designed to aid paraplegics. Unfortunately, these cannot be used by persons with higher degree of impairment, such as quadriplegics, i.e. persons that, due to age or illness, cannot 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.