Using an Eye Gaze New Combined Approach to Control a Wheelchair Movement

Persons with mobility impairments have a lower quality of life, being affected at physical, psychological, social and financial level. More than a half of wheelchair users have difficulty going outside their homes, and this is reflected on their employment rate - only seventeen percent are employed. More than half of power wheelchair users reported difficulty in learning how to maneuver a traditional power wheelchair. The progress registered in mobile robotics allowed the creation of smart wheelchairs, which opens the opportunity for new ways to develop user interfaces and even to add navigation aids thus approaching the difficulties in learning how to maneuver the wheelchair. An intuitive way to give commands is using the eye gaze. This paper presents a smart user interface, based on eye gaze tracking, called Display/Eye Tracker device Set (DETS). DETS is a highly customizable user interface in relation to the specific, particular needs for each wheelchair user. DETS is also a command input for a semi-autonomous navigation system, based on VHF+ algorithm, in which the wheelchair user is able to select a destination in a local mapped space; the wheelchair control system will then move towards the selected destination in autonomous mode.