Design of an arduino based voice-controlled automated wheelchair

This paper represents the design of an Arduino based voice controlled automated wheelchair. The design is developed with a voice recognition system, which allows the physically disabled person to control the wheelchair by voice command who have issues in hand movement due to ageing or paralysis for joystick controlled wheelchairs. The design also provide some additional features such as obstacle detection for the safe movement and a GSM based navigation system for tracking and sending notifications to increase the usability of the automated wheelchair system. To implement the design, Arduino Mega2560, Easy VR3 speech recognition module, SIM900A GSM module and relay based motor controller circuits are used along with the wheelchair. The designed wheelchair system does not require any wearable sensors for using other biomedical signals to control wheelchair movement (i.e. EEG, EMG, EOG sensors) as reported in several research studies which require complex signal processing techniques done with an extra bulky computing system attached with the wheelchair. In the proposed design, the speech processing is done solely with the available integrated speech processing module (Easy VR3) which removes the necessity of any bulky complex extra computing device. Moreover, the proposed technique is relatively simple and cheaper to implement with the widely used available electronic devices in comparison to other existing techniques which will have a great impact on the societies of developing and under developing countries.