Engineering Smart Wheelchairs

“Our end goal with this is for people who have disabilities to be able to have freedom,”

Martin Gerdzhev, graduate student working on the SmartWheeler at McGill University in Montreal.

 Having a wheelchair that can autonomously navigate its environment would be a boon for children or people who have cognitive impairments, don’t have enough upper body strength to maneuver a regular wheelchair or are paraplegics. Often people who can’t move their hands and arms must resort to “sip and puff” devices that control a motorized wheelchair through changes in air pressure, which can get exhausting.  Researchers have been working on robotic wheelchairs for decades, but thanks to the advent of better computer-vision and navigation algorithms, more powerful computers and more sensitive sensors, scientists are starting to make some progress.

Plus, there are self-driving cars on the road now, from Google and many automakers. With more public awareness of autonomous vehicles, so the technology doesn’t seem as foreign or futuristic as it once did.   For full article please see: http://cs.mcgill.ca/~smartwheeler/index.html

"The hard part, she says, is convincing insurance companies and government health agencies to pay for them, as autonomous wheelchairs aren’t going to come cheap."

Case Western Reserve University