Design of voice-controlled wheelchair for quadriplegic patients

Powered wheelchairs with standard joysticks are difficult to control for 'Quadriplegics' patients. Wheelchair movement based on speaker's voice command will be helpful for the physically challenged people to mobilise themselves. So in this work a set of ten male and female voice commands (FORWARD, BACKWARD, LEFT, RIGHT and STOP) were recorded at different instances using a microphone and analysed how patient's voice differs from others by considering the parameters of amplitude, frequency and phase in the MATLAB software. FFT technique is used for feature extraction and smoothing the patient's voice signal. The processed signal is stored as a reference signal in LabVIEW for interfacing with hardware. The powered wheelchair movement depends on motor control and a drive system which consists of PIC 16F877A microcontroller and DC motor. Once the voice recognisation system identifies the voice command uttered by the patient, it is coded into digital signal and transferred to the PIC microcontroller which then controls the wheelchair accordingly. Copyright © 2017 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.