The human-environment interface design with a vision assistance module or a smart wheelchair

Abstract

Automatic and intelligent health care service becomes important with the growth of aged population. To achieve intelligent mobility for a smart wheelchair, we proposed to construct a friend user-environment interface that users can interact with the living environment like a normal healthy person. An integrated interactive platform, including touch control panel, together with several cameras, and wireless sensors, is embedded on a wheelchair to achieve human interaction. Interaction functions, such as appliance control, semi-automatic vision assistant function, and physiological information monitoring function etc. have been developed to achieve the target. The goal of light mobility can be reached and the overall smart wheelchair system comprises: a mobile vehicle, information sensor modules, analysis control modules and an image capture unit which is set towards the headrest direction of the mobile vehicle to capture human facial image data. The physiological sensor module is used for sensing user physiological data. The analysis control module seamlessly transmits monitoring signals to a caregiver side in response to the image data or physiological data. These user-environment interaction functions are developed under the design target of human technology that the wheelchair user can interact with the environment like a normal person.