A smart mobility solution for physically challenged

This paper presents a hand gesture and a vision driven wheelchair system for physically handicapped people. The system is contrived to have a utilitarian design that caters to most of the disabilities rather than just one. In order to minimize system-human interaction, we have endeavored to present two distinct but closely related concepts viz. the hand gesture and vision based control system in conjunction for the wheelchair control. The wheelchair system is designed such that it provides for a natural and an intuitive user interface which can comprehend and react to in compliance with the users´ instinctive volition which eases the mobility of the physically challenged people. All image processing was performed using NI Vision Assistant. NI LabVIEW was used to train and implement Neural Networks for Hand Gesture Classification and also to enable motion control. A prototype was developed on which all our experiments were successfully carried out. The system has been tested for users with varied hand shapes and proved to be extremely reliable.