Development of Operation System for Electric Wheelchair by Voluntary Movements of Head

Recent almost developed countries like Japan, senior people are increasing. In such as aging society, supplying human resource to care the senior people doesn't catch up with its demands. Therefore, the societies encourage the cared elderly people become to manage to live by themselves in their life. To realize such as the society of independent elderly people, many assistive machines and tools are developed. In particular, electric wheelchairs are very effective to keep and improve their Quality of Life (QOL).  In this study, to promote the use of electric wheelchairs, a novel operation system for electric wheelchair using pointing device (Hands-Free Operation-Interface) is proposed. The proposed system can operate an electric wheelchair without body action. To investigate operation system of the wheelchair, its driving performance is compared with driving using a standard joystick under same slalom course running.  There were some obstacles in the slalom course, driver needed to drive the electric wheelchair and make own way around these obstacles to goal. In this experiment, success-ratio and running time are compared between Hands-Free Operation-Interface and standard joystick operation to evaluate the operability of the systems. As a result, it is suggested that success-ratio is depended on operators, and the average of success-ratio is 67 %. Also running time is observed that depended on driving ability of operators. Therefore, these results showed that practice and adapting of users are necessary to drive the electric wheelchair using the proposed operation system. In addition, this study showed some direction for controlling the system safely.