Smarter wheelchairs who can talk to each other: An integrated and collaborative approach

Abstract

Pervasive computing technologies can benefit the injured, disabled or elderly people in their daily lives, and smart wheelchair has been a representative of this kind of technologies. However, most existing smart wheelchairs have limitations on extensibility and flexibility of building new functionalities. One big reason is they are just stand-alone ones considering other wheelchairs and surrounding things as dummy objects. To address this issue, we proposed an integrated and collaborative approach: Smarter Wheelchairs that can “talk” to each other, and even “talk” to other things in the surrounding. Smarter Wheelchairs take advantages of smart objects deployed in living environment or hospital environment. Smarter Wheelchairs can harness functions provided by smart objects, therefore, their functionality can be flexibly extended. We have implemented and evaluated a prototype system of Smarter Wheelchairs to demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency of our approach.