Design and Development of a Smart Multifunction Toilet Wheelchair (SMTW)

An estimated 75 million people or approximately 1% of the world's population are wheelchair users. Even though there are some existing products and technologies that facilitate the ease of access of such individuals to public facilities, half of the wheelchair users have reported difficulty in transferring to or using toilets. To address this issue, a novel smart multifunctional wheelchair that can be transformed from a normal ergonomic platform to a roll-over-toilet design that can automatically position over any public toilet is proposed. This concept can be incorporated into a variety of standard manual wheelchairs with minimum modification. This paper describes the preliminary study and the design of an initial prototype, which was developed to demonstrate the design features that include mechanical modifications, sensor systems, and the voice user interface. Although the design concept is unique and these results are promising, further development and testing are necessary to improve the reliability, prior to further experiments with human subjects.