Smart Wheelchair Design for Elderly and Disabled People

Abstract

This paper proposes a gesture based wheelchair design using Raspberry Pi. A wheelchair is designed where physically disabled or elderly people can control the wheelchair and a nearby person can see the status message on the LCD. These tasks can be performed using hand gestures. This enables the disabled person to drive the wheelchair and move more efficiently from one place to another. The Raspberry Pi acts as a brain that enables the components to fulfil their tasks. Flex sensors detect hand movements and are transferred as data input to the Raspberry Pi. The motor driver drives the motors. The system status is reflected as a message on the LCD screen and the operations are monitored. In return for four hand movements, the wheelchair can be controlled in forward, left and right directions and stop command. If desired, the design can be edited and the motor movement and LCD screen message can be rearranged for different hand movements. With the advantage of flexible design, personalized needs can be met. This makes the design more flexible and improvable than a joystick-controlled wheelchair and more costeffective than a voice-controlled wheelchair.