949Design and Implementation of Low Cost Intelligent

Design and Implementation of Low Cost Intelligent Wheelchair Mohammed Faeik Ruzaij , S.Poonguzhali Center for Medical Electronics, Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering ,College of Engineering Guindy, Anna University, Chennai-600025, India [email protected] , [email protected] Abstract — The wide spread prevalence of l ost li mbs and sensing system is of major concern in present day due to wars, accident, age and health problems. An intelligent wheelchair is developed to help these type of patients by using speech recognition system to control the movement of wheelchair in different directions by using voice commands and also the simple movement of the patient's fingers with keypad control. Automatic obstacle detection is done using an ultrasound system which helps the patient to apply a temporary brake in case any obstacle suddenly comes in the way of the wheelchair. The intelligent wheelchair is designed in such a way that it can be controlled easily with minimum effort from the patient and also provides protection from obstacle collision if any voice mistake happens. The main advantage is the low cost design which allows more number of patients to use this type of wheelchair. Keywords- Intelligent ; Obstacles detection ; Ultrasonic sensor ; Voice recognition; Wheelchair. I. I NTRODUCTION There are patients who have lost control of both arms and legs, as a result of higher level spinal cord injury or brain and nervous system disorder. These kinds of patients can't use the standard wheelchair which depends on the arms muscular force to move the wheelchair. At the same time, they can't use the electrically powered wheelchair which is controlled by joystick. So these types of patients still need the help of another person to move their wheelchair from one place to another. Many researchers have proposed different methods to control the wheelchair. One of the possible solutions for them is to use their voice to control the wheelchair. Voice recognition technology depends on converting a particular spoken word to an electrical signal which is further digitized in order to be processed by a computer or microcontroller [1] . Akira Murai et al.(2009) proposed a n ew functional voice activated wheelchair. The system used commercial electronic powered wheelchair, grammar based voice recognition system and laptop with six Peripheral Interface Controller (PIC). So the complexity and cost of this system will be high [2]. Uvais Qidwai et al. (2010), proposed the design of a speech-controlled wheelchair using a Fuzzy Inference system (FIS) under MATLAB software as speech processor. The recognition system faced difficulties in noisy environment [3]. Another method for controlling the wheelchair instead of voice is also developed, S-.Y. Cho et al. (2009), proposed an idea of building a Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) to control the movement of electric wheelchairs. The aim is to explore the area of research on BCI based control to potentially develop a next generation of electric wheelchair which is able to benefit paralyzed patients. This Electroencephalograph (EEG) interfacing development controls a wheelchair through a skid steering method [4] . Zhang-fang Hu et al. (2010) , proposed a head gesture recognition approach by comparing the location of the lips with a fixed rectangular window. The head gesture commands are determined, including head up, head down, turn left, turn right, and the intelligent wheelchair movement such as turn left, turn right, forward, backward are determined correspondingly [5]. Rini Akmeliawati et al. (2011), proposed a wheelchair with a hand-glove control system for easier maneuvering by bending the fingers. Intended users control the system by wearing an instrumented glove fitted with flex or bend sensors for controlling the movement and direction of the wheelchair. Uni-directional wireless communication exists between the instrumented gloves and the controller which is sandwiched between the user’s seat and the wheels [6]. This method is not useful for the patient who has amputee or paralyzed arm. The presented work is innovative in the sense, it uses voice recognition control system with different language to control the movement of the wheelchair which is not available commercially. The use of obstacle detection system will stop the wheelchair if it finds any obstacle. This will provides more safety to the users. The cost effectiveness of the system makes it affordable for the patients to use. II. METHODOLOGY The block diagram shown in Fig.1 includes all the wheelchair elements, starting with the microphone which is used to pick up the voice command (sound wave) from the user and convert it to an electrical signal. The next unit is the voice recognition circuit which receives the output of the microphone, digitizes it and stores the result signal as template which indicates the users command. The core of this unit is the HM2007 voice recognition IC. ISBN: 978-1-4673-1601-9/12/$31.00 ©2012 IEEE 468 ICRTIT-2012

949Design and Implementation of Low Cost Intelligent

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