Mobility for the severely disabled: a head-controlled wheelchair

Abstract

Today, there are approximately 75 million wheelchair users worldwide. From this collective, there is a percentage of people, the severely disabled, whose motor capabilities below the neck are damaged, and despite the fact that they are also wheelchair users, they can’t really move it their own. Even though research has been attempting to bring a reliable hands-free control for them for nearly two decades, still no commercial models exist, as no system has proven to be reliable enough for a real environment situation. In this thesis, I study the most successful remote control modalities so far involving head and eye tracking, and develop from scratch a collection of 3 enhanced navigation systems inspired from the best of each. These three systems allow to successfully control a powered wheelchair using exclusively the head via IMU sensors, the eyes via a head-mounted eyetracker, and a combination of both. Finally, I test the first two systems on myself and also on different healthy people to contrast their performance with respect to the standard joystick navigation. From the results collected, I propose future improvements that could step up level of these hands-free controllers to the market level.