Toward gesture controlled wheelchair: A proof of concept study

This study focuses on the early stages of developing and testing an interactive approach for gesture-based wheelchair control that could facilitate the user in various tasks such as cooking and food serving. The proposed method allows a user to hold an object (tray, saucepan, etc) with both hands and to control at the same time the wheelchair direction via changing the position of his/her arms. The wheelchair control system contains an image sensor directed to the user´s arms. Sensor signals are processed via an image-recognition algorithm and the calculations for the arm positions are used for the computation of the wheelchair steering signals. Thus, the wheelchair direction depends on the arm positions and the user can control the wheelchair by moving his/her arms. An initial wheelchair prototype, operated by the intentional motions of one hand, was built and was tested by several initial experiments.