Abstract
The haptic feedback, which is natural in assistive devices intended for visually impaired persons, has been only recently explored for people with motor disability. The aim of this work is to study its potential, particularly for assistance in the driving of powered wheelchairs. After a review of the literature for the previous related work, we present the methodology and the implementation procedure of a haptic feedback control system on a prototype of a smart wheelchair. We will also describe the approaches utilized to determine the appropriate force feedback that will ensure a cooperative behaviour of the system, and we will detail the two haptic driving modes that were developed, namely the active and passive modes. Experiments on a real prototype were carried out to study the contribution of the method in powered wheelchair driving and to evaluate the interest of the force feedback on the control joystick of the wheelchair. They are discussed on the basis of performance measures.
Highlights
This work lies within the general scope of assistive technologies for disabled persons
We present here a study of the potentialities of haptic feedback for assistive technologies intended for people with motor disabilities
Our aim is to design a new control mode for powered wheelchairs based on haptic feedback: depending on obstacles proximity, we apply a force on the device to help the pilot moving towards the closest free space to the direction he has chosen
Summary
This work lies within the general scope of assistive technologies for disabled persons. Within this framework, the human–machine interaction is an essential feature and must be taken into account for every type of functionality For persons with disabilities, this dialogue through conventional channels may become difficult, or even impos-. Three senses are naturally requested for the information feedback towards the user: vision, hearing and touch. This last one is broadly defined as “haptic” by including tactile and proprioceptive information A sensory deficiency can be counterbalanced by the assistive device by calling upon another sense. A mobility aid for blind people will use the haptic sense (blind cane) or the auditory sense (a telemetric cane that returns a sonic image of the near environment)
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