Power wheelchair open platform

Power wheelchairs have high costs in developing countries, making its access difficult to the physically impaired, its main target audience, and to groups that develop assistive technologies, such as researchers, independent developers and entrepreneurs. Free software and open hardware have been successfully used to bridge access gap in areas where cost was a problem, democratizing the innovation process. This paper presents an open hardware and software platform developed for power wheelchairs, which aims to contribute to research and development in this area and stimulate local industry to implement affordable assistive technologies. We believe this work can be used as model for future research on open electronics platforms.