Novel Non-Contact Control System for Medical Healthcare of Disabled Patients

Abstract

When limb-disabled patients want to activate the nurse emergency call system, adjust the temperature on air-conditioners, switch on or off lights, watch television, or have other urgent needs, and require assistance from other people, their needs cannot be readily met if there is no one around. All above devices need to be operated manually or with a remote control. Thus, disabled patients cannot operate by themselves, and this also increases the burden of the nursing assistants. In order to improve the above issue, a novel non-contact control system is designed to allow disabled patients activating the nurse emergency call system and adjusting other appliances. Disabled patients can stare at the control icons of a visual stimulus generator, which accompanies a wearable electroencephalogram (EEG) acquisition device with non-contact dry electrode for monitoring patients’ EEG signals and converting the EEG signals into relevant control commands via the signal processing system, to achieve the function of nurse calling and the effect of controlling the devices in a hospital. The result shows that the proposed system could effectively monitor and convert EEG signals and achieve the control effects for which disabled a patient desires in a hospital. Therefore, the non-contact control system provides a new control framework for the facilities in a hospital, which significantly assist patients with limb disability.