Design of a Prototype Mechatronic Wheelchair for People with Motor Disabilities

Mendoza-Montoya J.; Angulo-Oviedo K.E.; Turpo-Apaza E.Y.; Alfonte-Zapana R. · CEUR Workshop Proceedings (2023)

Resumen

People with motor disabilities require some mechanism or technological solution to move around autonomously. The most common way is through a voice-controlled electromechanical chair; however, these solutions are expensive and often require expert support in training. This paper aims to design a low-cost and easy-to-use electromechanical chair that allows autonomous navigation controlled by an electronic interface, a joystick, and voice recognition. In the first step, modeling an electrical wheelchair prototype with 3D software is essential; subsequently, a voice command system to control wheelchair navigation is developed based on the speech recognition library of Python. Finally, an electronic interface is designed and integrated into an Arduino Mega embedded module to recognize the voice commands and control the wheelchair's mechanical system navigation. The results of this research are promising, considering the low cost of hardware design, the well-performance prototype, and the easy-to-use navigation system. The joystick control was accurate and gave four essential movements to the wheelchair; the voice recognition uses multi-tasking with threading algorithms to interpret and execute wheelchair navigation commands simultaneously. To enhance the prototype performance in future advances, optimizing the time response in command execution and setup system to individual user's requirements is recommendable.

Instituciones: Universidad Tecnológica del Perú