Smart Wheelchair design and monitoring via wired and wireless networks

Abstract

Several works for handicapped people's help and assistance have been investigated in the last decade and particularly those concerning hardware and software architectures design related to automated wheelchairs. Thus, make a wheelchair intelligent and autonomous, leads to develop new strategies taking into account in one hand, environment dynamics, and in other hand, recent communication technologies such as ad hoc radio networks, sensor networks, wireless mesh networks, etc. The aim of this paper is to present new hardware and software architecture of an intelligent system called LIASD-Wheelchair. This system is a kind of home welfare tools used to assists and help the handicapped and elderly people to gain mobility and lead to independent life. The developed wheelchair moves fully autonomously according to environment changes and uses a multimode communication for its maneuverability and localization via Wi-Fi communication network. To test the effectiveness of the developed system, an experiment is designed in this respect.