An Intelligent Wheelchair to enable mobility of severely disabled and elder people

In this paper, we develop an Intelligent Wheelchair (IW) system for the severely disabled people. The main function of our system is two-fold: 1) user intention recognition using vision technique and 2) sensor-based obstacle detection and path finding. The proposed system enable a user to control IW using his mouth shape and face movement. Furthermore, to fully guarantee user´s safety, the 10 range sensors are used to detect obstacles in environment and avoid them. To assess the effectiveness of the proposed IW, it was tested with 34 users and then the results show that it can provide a user unable to drive a standard joystick with friendly and convenient system.