Publication

Abstract : There are large number of people in the world with debilitating physical disabilities and elderly who experience significant difficulties in performing even very basic tasks such as locomotion, speaking, writing etc. The worst affected class of physically challenged are those who have become paralyzed over a significant percentage of their bodies, i.e. quadriplegics. These people find it extremely difficult to perform any task that requires even small amount of force. We propose a gesture based wheelchair for the benefit of physically challenged and elderly to navigate inside house without much effort. Our proposed system uses a small camera mounted very close to the user’s hand, which tracks the small movements of their fingers to understand the direction of movement of the wheelchair. A recognition system which identifies the gesture is then interfaced to the wheelchair control system in order move it to the desired location. For point to point navigation without human intervention we propose two unconventional methods: Line Following Navigation (LFN) and Location Aware and Remembering Navigation (LARN). These two methods are simple and cost effective for indoor positioning or navigation.