Wearable master device for spinal injured persons as a control device for motorized wheelchairs

Abstract

This paper describes a wearable master device for people with a spinal injury who can move their neck and shoulders but cannot move their legs and arms. A device that measures the movements of their neck or shoulder can help them to drive a wheelchair. The sensors of such a wearable master device must be lightweight, small, and easily attached to cloth. Therefore, optical fiber curvature sensors are used to measure the human body motion. For a previously developed wearable master device, two calibration and mapping methods with, the sensors are proposed to extract 2-DOF human shoulder motions. One is constructed with simple geometric equations. The other is constructed with a multilayered artificial neural network. The two methods are compared, Experimental results show that the wearable master device can be used effectively for a 2-DOF input device for handicapped persons. It was also shown that a subject can control a mobile robot with the wearable master device.

Optical Sensors Based on Plastic Fibers

“…Thus, to solve these problems, new approaches appeared. In order to develop a system to assist handicapped people to move in a wheelchair, Lee et al [ 96 ] presented a system constituted by two side-polished optical fibers placed on the shoulder of a user. The polished side increased the sensitivity to bending and allowed the measurement of concavity.…”

Optical Fibre Bending Sensor With Automatic Intensity Compensation

“…The most beneficial attribute of the optical fibre sensor is their insensitivity to electromagnetic interference as demonstrated in [15]. Due to these advantages, the optical fibre sensors have also been studied in other biomedical applications, for example knee [16], [17], shoulder [18] and respiration [19] monitoring.…”