Design and Implementation of Voice Controlled Wheelchair using MATLAB

Abstract

Most physically challenged people to rely on others for their motion and the number of such people is increasing day by day. Manual Wheelchairs are quite difficult to operate by physically challenged people as they require force for the motion. To overcome this drawback, conventional wheelchairs or powered wheelchairs are available in the markets. Even if they are meant to design for the comfort of users they are quite expensive, so not every physically challenged can afford them. To reduce the percentage of use of a manual wheelchair and to give physically challenged people a better experience and comfort in an affordable manner we have proposed this model. Our proposed model is based on neural networks and the backpropagation algorithm is used as a medium to train the Artificial neural networks which are trained by the user’s voice command so it uses voice recognition as a control mechanism. The proposed prototype is been trained with five voice commands such as (Forward, Backward, Left, Right, and Stop). These voice commands are successfully identified and converted to text. The following text is further written on target hardware wirelessly by using a Bluetooth module for the motion of DC Motors to control the directions of a wheelchair. The entire prototype is been designed on Matlab R2020a and Arduino UNO as target hardware. The main aim of our proposed work is to develop a smart wheelchair that overcomes the problems of existing systems and should be easy, impressionable, and convenient for physically challenged people.