Design and Development of GPS and Voice Recognition Control Smart Aided Wheelchair

Pey, Hao Meng (2018) Design and Development of GPS and Voice Recognition Control Smart Aided Wheelchair. Final Year Project (Bachelor), Tunku Abdul Rahman University College.

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Abstract

Wheelchairs are used by the people who face difficulty in walking or impossible to walk due to illness either in physiological or physical, injury or disability. Generally, the conventional type of wheelchair is the manual wheelchair and the electric-powered wheelchair. However, this conventional type wheelchair requires the user to use their arms to control the wheel chair, either by turning the hand rims for the manual wheelchair or using the joystick control for electric-powered wheelchair to move the wheelchair. Nowadays, the number of the elderly and physical challenged people in all countries of the world are gradually increased. Most of the elderly and physical challenged people depend on the wheelchair to help them move around in order to perform their daily activities. However, the patients who suffer from chronic mobility impairments such as quadriplegics and multiple sclerosis find it difficult to operate the conventional type wheelchair as they have lost their ability to use their arms. They often require the help from others to push the wheelchair to the desired location as they cannot move the wheelchair by themselves. Therefore, a smart wheelchair with voice recognition controlled is designed and developed for the physically disabled people so that they can navigate the wheelchair to the desired location using voice command. With the voice recognition controlled wheelchair, the user is able to navigate the wheelchair by speaking the voice commands such as “move”, “move back”, “make a left turn”, “make a right turn” and “brake now” or by using route spoken by the GPS navigation system to navigate the wheelchair. The average overall efficiency of 80% is being achieved when different voice commands is given to navigate the wheelchair. When different pitch is used to speak the voice commands, the voice recognition system is able to achieve an overall efficiency of 72.5%. As the given voice command is using fast and slow speaking rate, the average overall efficiency of 62.5% is being achieved where the rate of recognition is depends on which voice command is spoken. When different male and female voices are used to speak the voice commands, the average accuracy of the voice recognition system is about 70% for male voices and about 80% for female voices. The accuracy of voice recognition system is vary as it depends on which voice command is given as different people will have different pitch or tone. By using the GPS command to navigate the wheelchair to move from one location to another location, the overall efficiency of 50% is being achieved by the voice recognition system.