Computer systems and strategies to assist a disabled person in navigating a powered wheelchair through a doorway

The research project described in this paper, which is concerned with new developments in electric vehicles for disabled people, was first presented in the IEE Colloquium Digest P6-1995/055, pp. 5/1-5/6 (March 1995). This paper describes the system and advances in the methods since that time. A real-time method of computer assistance for a disabled person to move a powered wheelchair through a doorway is presented. The wheelchair uses data from ultrasonic sensors combined with information from a user input, in this case a joystick. The output is used to assist the disabled person in steering the vehicle.