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Design of Voice-Controlled Smart Wheelchair for Physically Challenged

Persons: Proceedings of IEMIS 2018, Volume 3

Chapter · January 2019

DOI: 10.1007/978-981-13-1501-5_7

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 Design of Voice Controlled Smart Wheelchair for
Physically Challenged Persons

Khagendra Joshi1, Rakesh Ranjan2, Erukonda Sravya3, Mirza Nemath Ali Baig4
1
Department of ECE, Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi (IIIT-D),
New Delhi– 110020, India
2,3,4
Department of ECE, CMR Engineering College, Hyderabad,
Telangana-501401, India
{ email: 1khagendra@iiitd.ac.in, 2rakeshranjan385@gmail.com; 3sravya.1724@gmail.com;
4
mirzanemath@gmail.com}

Abstract. Physically challenged persons those who are suffering through

different physical disabilities face many challenging problems in their day to
day life for commutating from one place to another and even sometimes they
need to have to be dependent on other person to move from one place to
another. There have been many significant efforts over the past few years to
develop smart wheel chair platforms that could enable the person for its ease of
operation without any ambiguity. The main aim of our paper is to develop the
smart wheel chair to make the life easier of physically challenged persons. This
voice controlled smart wheel chair comes with enhanced features like electric
powered, voice control, line follower with obstacle avoidance etc. The smart
wheel chair control unit consists of integration of AVR microcontroller
ATmega328 with Bluetooth module, GSM module SIM900, ultrasonic and
infrared sensors, temperature sensor LM35 and motor driving circuit for
controlling motor’s speed.
Keywords: Smart wheel chair, voice control, Arduino, ultrasonic sensor,
Bluetooth module HC-05, Android phone, Line follower.

1 Introduction

A smart wheel chair is a wheel chair which moves with the help of navigational
controls and an electric motor instead of moving it using man power. The
navigational controls are usually controlled with the help of a small joystick placed
near to the arm rest, chin operated joysticks, head switches, eye blinks etc. that offers
different operations to the wheel chair [1 – 4, 8 – 10, 15].
Most of the physically disabled person uses traditional wheelchairs. They are
operated by hands or by a second person if patient is unable to drive it. This is very
difficult for that person if another person is not there for support. In that case there is
always requirement of a second person [9]. Thus the patients have to be dependent on
another person.
What will happen if wheelchair starts moving with audio input like forward,
backward, left and right? The disabled person can move anywhere he wants without
the help of second person and independently. There will be no need to use hands for
moving the wheelchair. We are trying to implement this concept through our project
“Smart wheelchair”[2, 11-14]. The name itself indicates the meaning the wheelchair
which is intelligent. This wheelchair takes commands from user and according to that
it moves in required direction. The person who is unable to move chair by hands can
move this wheelchair just by giving the commands. This is the boon for paralyzed
people. Hence using this chair, the patient can go anywhere independently. This is
economical and fully automated. Hence physically disabled people can use this
wheelchair easily and live their life happily.
In this paper, the design of a Smart wheelchair is presented. The main motivation
for this design came through the feedback from personal experiences of several
colleagues as well as rehabilitation centers of the local hospitals that many elderly
patients are unable to use the electronic wheelchairs. This is primarily due to the fact
that the types of illnesses common in this group of patients render damages to the
motor system of the body affecting mostly arms and feet. Hence, using a joystick type
control of an electronic wheelchair is almost impossible. It was however noticed that
the speech remains mostly un-altered for these patients and hence it is used in this
work to be the main controlling agent for the motion of the wheelchair [1, 3, 4, 8, 10].
ATmega328 microcontroller is the heart of the control circuit. The voice recognition
is done by an android application i.e. AMR voice. The wheelchair moves according to
voice commands given by user.
The smart wheel chair also includes obstacle detection with line follower [13]. As
the condition of the patient/person with disability degrades, he/she might not be able
to control the wheel chair using joy stick because of the shock from the situation or
lack of energy. This loss of independence to move around freely using the whhel chair
would be a serious drawback. So we need a wheel chair that is completely self
learning and this particular smart wheel chair owns it. It also provides a temperature
sensor which continuously senses the temperature of patient and send message to the
doctor in emergency.

2 Related Work

The Researchers are showing a kin interest in the research area of smart controlling
the wheel chair. The wheelchair is especially for those persons who are unable to
move their body parts other than head and neck [2, 4, 11]. The movements are sensed
using an in-mouth position sensor. Smart wheelchairs are also under research. These
wheelchairs sense obstacles in path of user [13]. Sensors are mounted in the circuit to
sense the objects. These wheelchairs contain voice recognition circuit as well as
sensors.
Most of the systems have different options to perform tasks which are assumed
to be difficult for a disabled person. In order to make the operation of the wheel chair
by the disabled persons much simpler and easier, we simplified and developed the
control system with help of voice command system. This voice command system
helps in moving the wheel chair with short voice control commands. The number of
physically disabled people in society have greatly aggravated in the past decade as a
result of increasing war and aging population. The demand for the improving the
quality of life of such people has therefore been a major concern. The largest problem
faced by all handicapped, paralyzed and disabled is immobility and the need of an
artificial means of transport. The common and largely used solution in this regard is a
wheelchair, but a wheelchair is associated with a number of disadvantages. The
amount of user effort required for pulling and pushing the wheels, lack of security and
stability prevents a physically weak user from operating a wheelchair on his own and
makes him depend on another person's help. With the busy life styles of people in
today's society, this can be very in-affordable. Users who cannot use their arms have
absolutely no way of using a traditional wheelchair.
In the existing traditional wheel chair where the person has to push the wheel chair,
though it has advantages like independence to move, exercise and transportability in a
cost effective way but it has the disadvantages like lack of efficient assistance on
inclines and irregular terrains, fatigue and repetitive stress injuries. These
disadvantages are overcome by present day power wheel chairs. The power wheel
chairs with the joysticks placed near the arm rest helps in assisting without much
effort. But most of the patients have injuries to their limbs, where they can’t move
the joysticks. So, in the proposed systems, instead of a moving the wheel chair with a
joystick, the wheel chair is moved with the help of voice commands. Mounting of
sensors, line detector and obstacle detectors made the system avoid collisions or
accidents. Equipping it with a temperature sensor intimate the family and concerned
doctors about the patient temperature. This gives the patient independence to move
freely without manual help, also helps the family to rest assure with a safe, collision
avoidance system.

2.1 History of Wheelchair

Earlier a wheel chair, used by the disabled people to move around while sitting in it,
was propelled manually either by others or by the disabled person itself Now a days
they are available by a little automated. Here is the brief explanation of the wheel
chair history used by the people with illness, injuries or disabilities. The usage of the
wheel chair can be observed in European continent from around the times of German
Renaissance. A drawing dated 1595, of the Spain King, King Philips I1, shows him in
a wheel chair with foot and armrests. England recorded the usage of wheel chair
from 1670’s. However, it was not able to be self-propelled. In 1783, Englishman John
Dawson built the first wheelchair that was self-propelled by pushing the wheels. With
the invention of Self propulsion push rims, the modern wheel chair have began to take
shape since 1881. In 1900 the wooden spiked wheels are replaced by the wire spiked
wheels. The first motorized wheelchair was invented in 1918. The wheel chair with
voice activation had used by a Norwegian law student where he used it for attending
the classes without an attendant help [8-14].

2.2 Types of Disability

A report on disability by World Health Organization (WHO) states that around 15

percent of the world population are living with some kind of disability [6]. Out of
which about 2-4 percent had difficulties in functioning . United Nation Development
Program (UNDP) estimated that around 80 percent of the disabled people live in
developing countries. In India, the census 2011 which collected data for 8 disabilities,
states that 20.5 percent of the disabilities lies in the movement [5]. The restriction in
movement due to disability lead to the low self-esteem, stress, isolation, fear of
abandoning,etc. Arthiritis patients and Multiple sclerosis patients suffer from severe
disabilities by which they cannot nmove the joystick mounted on wheel chairs. The
purpose of the proposed wheel chair is providing the multi-control operated wheel
chair at a lower cost. Fig.1 is depicting the statistics of the disabled population by the
type of disability according to census 2011.

Fig. 1. Statistics of the disabled population by the type of disability according to

census 2011 [5].

3 Proposed Wheel Chair System

The Smart Wheelchair” comprise of voice recognition, line follower circuit along
with obstacle detection, temperature sensor along with GSM module. Fig 2 is
showing the block diagram of the propsed model.
The voice controller is clubbed with android smart phone at the side of Bluetooth
module. The android smart phone support BT Voice Control for Arduino [7, 8, 16,
17]. This application software uses android phone’s internal voice recognition to
forward voice commands to the microcontroller Pairs with Bluetooth Serial Modules
and sends in the recognized voice as a string. while android device is paired with
microcontroller(ATmega328) via Bluetooth we can give audio input like forward
,left, right back as well as line follower input to go to specific section of hospital.
Microcontroller section also have Bluetooth device to receive the data string
transmitted by android phone. Microcontroller executes these string inputs and gives
output at PWM pins. This Microcontroller has six PWM output pins. These PWM
pins can be used to run DC motors. Here we are using only four pins to drive DC
motor driver circuits which will drive motor subsequently. We used Arduino IDE
with embedded “C” programming for controller to implement the proposed task. The
temperature sensor used here is LM35 which is interfaced with microcontroller,
measures temperature of patient in degree Celsius and thus together with the GSM
module forms a patient monitoring system. As there are two motors so we used two
separate motor drivers, one for each. Along with this we have used 24V battery as
power source. Here the motor drivers used, are controlling the speed of the motors
with the help of PWM.There are some specific audio commands given as input to the
mobile via mic which are shown in Table 1.

Fig. 2. Block Diagram of the Proposed Model

Table 1. Voice control section

Audio Wheelchair
Stand for Motor A Motor B
Command Movement
F Forward Anticlockwise Clockwise Forward
L Left Anticlockwise Anticlockwise Left
R Right Clockwise Clockwise Right
B Backward Clockwise Anticlockwise Backward
S Stop Stop Stop Stop
K
M Specific path by line follower
V

3.1 Block Diagram Description

Microcontroller (AVR ATmega328) is the heart of this smart wheel chair system. All
the different types of module used in the smart system are controlled by the controller.
ATmega328 is a high performance, low power Atmel 8-bit Advanced RISC
microcontroller.

a. Line follower section

Line follower section is used to reach the specific section of hospital. This whole
section also follows the same control procedure i.e. the use of BT Voice Control
application which is installed in an android mobile .The patient has to speak the name
the particular section which are K, M and V.Line follower section consists of four
pair of IR sensors and one pair ultrasonic sensor. IR sensors are the main triggers of
the whole line following action mechanism. IR sensor is basically a transceiver. It
consists of one IR LED as transmitter and one Photodiode as receiver. The transmitter
section of IR sensor emits infrared light whch will be received by receiver diode and
according to the intensity or pulse width of receiving light the decision of the
movement has been taken by the wheel chair.There are two types of strips in line
following path which are black strip and white strip. There is no reflection from
Black strip, low or (‘0’) logic will reach to microcontroller and when there is white or
reflective surface there is high reflection and a high or (‘1’) reaches to
microcontroller. Fig. 3 is depicting line follower path with respective position of IR
sensors.

Fig. 3. Line follower path with respective position of IR sensors

When wheelchair is following black line, sensor will send the signal to
microcontroller and microcontroller executes these inputs and sends output to PWM
pins in which motor driver is connected. In Table 2, the detailed Wheelchair
movement according to sensor status has been shown.

Table 2. Wheelchair movement according to sensor status

Sensors Wheelchair
S4 S2 S1 S3 Movement
0 0 0 0 Stop
1 1 1 1 Forward
1 1 0 0 Left
1 1 0 1 Slight Left
0 0 1 1 Right
Slight Right
 b. Obstacle Detection

To avoid collision and obstracles obstacle, the ultrasonic sensor is used.Here we have
used HC-SR04 Ultrasonic sensor. Whenever the wheel chair is going on the desired
path the ultrasonic sensor transmits the ultrasonic waves without intruption. When
obstracle comes into the path, the sensor’s wave is reflected by the object and the
discountinouty in the reception of ultrasonic wave information is passed to the
microcontroller. The distance of obstacle is continuously display on LCD. If any
obstacle distant away less than 100 cm, wheelchair will stop and will notmove till the
obstacle is passed or went away greater than 100 cm from wheelchair.

c. Temperature Monitoring Module with Emergency Messaging

Temperature sensor (LM35) is used to continuously monitor the temperature of

patient. The sensor is attached with analog pin of microcontroller. This temperature
will display on LCD. GSM module is used to send a message to specific mobile
number. GSM module is interfaced with controller to Tx/Rx pin. If temperature of
patient gets higher than 37° C GSM will send a message to doctor that the patient
temperature is above the threshold so the doctor can reach to patient and can give
treatment to patient.

d. Motor Driver controller circuit

Motor driver circuit MD10C is used to run motors. MD10C is PWM enable motor
driver controller. The PWM output pins of microcontroller are connected to motor
driver circuit. Motor driver controller has one PWM pin and one direction (DIR) pin.
Speed of motor is controlled by PWM and direction pin is used to run the motor in
clockwise or anticlockwise direction. Permanent Magnet DC motors are connected to
motor drive circuit. In Table 3, motor driver control action has been discussed.

Table 3. Motor Driver Control Action

Wheelchair
Dir(1) Dir(2) PWM(1) PWM(2)
Conditions
1 1 1 1 Forward
0 0 1 1 Backward
0 0 0 0 Stop
1 0 1 0 Left
0 1 1 0 Right

e. Liquid Crystal Display (16x2)

LCD is use to monitor realtime temperature of patient and display the distance of
obstacle from wheelchair.LCD is connected to microcontrollers digital pins to get
digitized information of temperature from temperature sensor and distance of obstacle
given by ultrasonic sensor.

4 Circuit Details and System Specifications

The smart wheel chair control unit consists of integration of AVR microcontroller
ATmega328 with Bluetooth module, GSM module SIM900, ultrasonic and infrared
sensors, temperature sensor LM35 and motor driving circuit for controlling motor’s
speed. Fig. 4 and Fig.5 are combinely presenting the circuit diagram of smart
wheelchair system.

Fig. 4. Circuit Diagram of Smart Wheel Chair system from microcontroller side

Fig. 5. Circuit Diagram of Smart Wheel Chair system from IR Sensors Side
4.1 Features and System Specifications of Smart Wheel Chair

The features of smart wheel chair are following:-

 Voice controlled automatic wheelchair.
 Smooth speed variations for patient comfort through PWM Controlled DC
Motor
 Facility to convey message to the doctor in critical conditions and
monitoring body temperature.
 Line follower to follow definite path.
 Soft start & Soft Stop
 Emergency STOP
 Collision avoidance
In Fig. 6, the designed smart wheel system has been shown.

Fig. 6. Designed Smart WheelChair

The system Specifications has been described in Table 4.

Table 4. Specifications of Smart Wheelchair

Parameters Values
Height 4.1 feet
Width 1.6 feet
Weight 43kg
Wheel Diameter 36cm
Speed 3.31km/hr
Supply Voltage 24V,5V
Supply Current 8A
Load Capacity 85kg
5 Software Design

We used embedded “C” on Arduino IDE platform to code the controller. Voice
control action is done by BTvoice control android application. This application
software uses android phone’s internal voice recognition to forward voice commands
to the microcontroller Pairs with Bluetooth Serial Modules and sends in the
recognized voice as a string. while android device is paired with microcontroller via
Bluetooth we can give audio input like forward ,left, right back as well as line
follower input. In this application if one says Chair the phone will return a sting
*Chair# to your Bluetooth module. Here ‘*’and‘#’ is for start and stop bits
respectively. Fig. 7 is showing the flow chart for voice control.

Fig. 7. Flow chart for voice control

6 Conclusion

Our proposed smart wheel chair provides a safe and reliable system with the presence
of line follower and obstacle detector. It provides an easily accessible and a variety of
functionalities. In this paper, we developed a wheel chair system which includes
ultrasonic and infrared sensors to automatically track the paths provided and also
detects the obstacles in between the track along with a little intelligence of taking
proper care to avoid the accidental mishaps, where we got the desired results. Thus,
the disabled persons can be self reliable, safe and independent with the help of this
easily controllable wheel chair.Further improvement to the above implemented
 system can be done by providing additional sensors make the system more user
friendly and avoid accidents by self learning. Also security can be incorporated for
accessing with the help of biometric authentication, or including more control
commands to pass through different types of doorways.

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