Driving control of a powered wheelchair by voluntary eye blinking and with environment recognition

This paper describes the driving control system for a powered wheelchair using voluntary eye blinks. Recently, new human-computer interfaces (HCIs) that take the place of a joystick have been developed for people with disabilities of the upper body. In this paper, voluntary eye blinks are used as an HCI. However, the problem with this HCI is that the number of input directions and operations is smaller than that of a joystick, which causes inefficient movement. Therefore, assistive systems are needed for efficient and safe wheelchair movement. The proposed system is based on environment recognition and fuzzy logic. It can detect obstacles and passages, and speed and direction are calculated automatically for obstacle avoidance and right/left turns. The system's effectiveness is demonstrated through experiments with a real HCI in a real environment.