Design and Development of Smart Wheelchair System Using Hand Gesture Control

According to the data provided by WHO, about 15% of the world population i.e. about 1 billion people experience disability with various impairments. Studies reveal that of these, 10% of people have motor disability requiring a wheelchair. Individuals with severe motor impairment face difficulty with the existing wheelchair using joystick control in steering it. Hence the proposed system aims at designing and developing a hand gesture controlled semi-autonomous electric wheelchair that is adaptable both indoors and outdoors. The system is designed in such a way the user can operate the wheelchair using hand gestures and android application. Hand gesture control is employed through the MEMS sensor. It is a three-axis accelerometer sensor that measures the hand orientation of the user and by analysing the motion, Arduino microcontroller processes the data and helps in propelling the wheelchair accordingly. An android application with directional buttons where the user can operate and control the wheelchair by pressing the specific button as a command. Bluetooth module interfaced with Arduino is integrated with the android application to recognize the command and process the data respectively. The developed system incorporating the user interface helps to easily navigate and reduces the effort in manually propelling the wheelchair. Experimental results demonstrate the viability of the proposed system. The future development as speed control system, and ergonomic design with safety belts make it highly advanced mobility solution and improves the reliability of the system.