CePal: An InfraRed Based Remote Control for Cerebral Palsy Patients

This paper discusses the design and implementation details of a light weight, cost effective, portable tilt-based remote control to assist Cerebral Palsy patients. The remote control is used for controlling Infrared (IR) based appliances using an accelerometer and a microcontroller. Our objective is to ensure self reliance of Cerebral Palsy affected in controlling IR based appliances by means of a button-free remote control. The remote control, having the facility to switch over to the device of user´s choice, can control a number of functions of those devices. It can be used to control a TV, a tape recorder and several other infrared based equipments as well but, for this paper, we will restrict ourselves to explain how it has been implemented and tested on a TV and a Digital Photo Frame with their four basic functions. The name of the device is `CePal´ and it would be referred by the same name in subsequent sections of the paper.