Researchers in India are developing the first ever prototype of a Smart wheelchair that detects and avoids obstacles

I’ve heard quite often (and occasionally seen) from people who use a wheelchair about the common hazard created by obstacles. Bumping, scraping and snagging table corners or other inconvenient protruding objects, happens quite a lot. Doesn’t seem to matter how good you are with spatial awareness, sooner or later everybody who uses a wheelchair will bruise themselves.

So it’s nice to see this common and widely accepted issue being addressed by science…

While the facts available are a little limited just now I’ve been trying to ascertain what exactly this new Smart wheelchair does and how. The information released so far explains that the chair has “enhanced safety features along with warning systems to assist users more effectively than any conventional powered wheelchair”

It’s a little unclear as of yet whether the wheelchair just provides warnings or automatically avoids obstacles. The answer, it seems, is that the end goal is to produce a wheelchair that is able to detect obstacles and manoeuvres out of their way when it spots them. So far it just does the warnings. We have after all driverless cars that seem to have passed rigorous testing, so how long before fully automatic “driverless” wheelchairs are in use?

Another interesting feature of the chair is that it is equipped with sensors to detect how tired or stressed the wheelchair user is. An interesting extra add-on but, I’m a little unclear as to exact advantages (comment below if you’ve got a good guess).

Naveen Kumar Malik of the Department of Electronics and Communication at Maharishi Dayanand University in Haryana and V.R. Singh of the National Physical Laboratory have created the model which as of yet doesn’t appear to have a name.

The academic paper published recently by the engineers has the catchy title “A human inspired cognitive wheelchair navigation system” (granted this is a serious academic journal and not a channel 5 documentary so fair enough).

If you’re interested, you may like to see some more about the Blackwood Design Awards 2014 winner, the eye-controlled wheelchair.

Researchers in India are developing the first ever prototype of a Smart wheelchair that detects and avoids obstacles

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