Electric Wheelchair Control Using Wrist Rotation Based on Analysis of Muscle Fatigue

The wheelchair is one of the most common assistive technologies for people with motor impairment, due to its environmentally friendly features in terms of mobility and comfort. However, the operational method for the conventional wheelchair is still inconvenience for people with finger problems. Therefore, in the project, a novel control method to operate an electric wheelchair, using hand gestures (wrist rotation) is developed. Sixty-five (65) participants were involved in this study. Five hand gestures were considered and studied for forward, backward, right, left, and stop maneuvers while considering the human ergonomics factor. In this study, the stop maneuver was determined based on the most comfortable hand position to mitigate a fatigue experience, with two gesture classifying methods further investigated. The first method based on threshold has a promising accuracy of 96% and 91% precision. This method, however, requires a calibration every time a new user is introduced. The second method, a Naïve Bayes approach, was observed to solve the problem, as it has about 99% of both accuracy and precision. The evaluation of this method was then conducted with six participants that operated the wheelchair to follow the trajectories from start to end. The results showed that the participants comfortably controlled the developed wheelchair system to the goal without any collision. Results from experiments indicate that the proposed approach has high accuracy and the potential to solve the problem related to finger dependencies and hand fatigue.