Design and Development of a Smart Wheelchair Prototype for Physically Disabled People.

Abstract

Bangladesh is a developing country with a large number of people. Every year, a large number of people become lame due to road accident and unable to walk normally. Wheel chair is the best assistive device used by elder and differently abled people who cannot walked normally. The driving and controlling of traditional manual wheel chair are much harder task. So our aim is to build a powerful wheel chair which helps the handicapped (lower half of the body is paralyzed) people to travel without depending others. The bone for physically challenged people is a wheel chair. The wheel chair is developing day by day. The modern wheel chairs come equipped with a self-motor to help run the wheel chair by a joystick. The joystick controlled wheel chair is a bit difficult for certain people to operate. Mainly for old and weak people. Again, the voice controlled wheel chair is not suitable at all situation because of noisy environment and sound. It is also difficult to give command for old or weak people. Moreover this wheelchair is costly. So our proposal is to make such a cost effective electronic gesture based wheel chair which will be easy to operate rather than the joystick input. In our proposal, we will show to control a wheel chair using in build gesture function of a smartphone and touch sensor. A special feature of our wheel chair is that, obstacles in front of the way of wheel chair can be detected which can avoid the collision between chair with that detected obstacle. Another feature of this chair is to use an IP camera that gives visual and acoustic information to the guardian of the riding people. The aim of this developed electric wheelchair is to provide easy and comfortable life for the handicapped people whose lower half of the body is paralyzed.