Electric compass aided global positioning system navigation for powered wheelchairs

Abstract

Powered wheelchairs are an important mobility aid for the elderly and for persons with disability. According to World Health Organization statistics, most of the accidents were due to personal mistakes; if there is an auto-navigating system such as auxiliary, mistaken manipulation will decrease efficiency. This study attempted to improve the global positioning system (GPS) navigation of electric powered wheelchairs (EPWs) through the addition of an electric compass (EC) and tested the navigation of EPWs with EC-aided and non-EC-aided GPS navigation along a 25 m road. According to these tests, the use of the EC significantly reduces the errors in GPS navigation during movements such as go straight ahead, turn right and turn left. Therefore, the navigation reduced the error of the expected trajectories with the EC-aided navigation.

E-services for the social inclusion of people with disabilities: A literature review

“…Frequently, the overall aim of these studies was to examine, evaluate, test, and propose designs for e-services that were aimed at maintaining the health status of persons with disabilities. Survey based questionnaires [23][24][25][26][27] and descriptions of the methods that are used to develop ICT-based applications as e-services [28][29][30][31] were the two most common approaches that were used in this category of study. These studies covered a wide range of issues and discussed, for instance, how screening tools can be used to evaluate the potential use of e-health services for older persons with or without cognitive impairment, (ii) the multidimensional analysis of the disabilities, (iii) the presentation of evidence concerning the digital divide in the use of the Internet [32], (iv) validation of the use of video teleconferencing technology in the assessment of PTSD [24], and (v) the intra-oral computer interface an learning [33].…”

“…The results of the studies focused on how technology can be best used for the further development of e-services for health maintenance, or they introduced ICT-based applications such as tele-health [10,24,27,34], tele-rheumatology [35], tele-rehabilitation [36], tele-medicine [29], and Gerontechnology [12]. Example of services that were suggested in these studies include blind aid virtual reality services [28], eHAB tele-health systems [10], WebGAD [37], Iwalker [38] video training [39], NAVSTAR GPS [30], home monitoring systems [12,40], virtual reality [41], and video conferencing [24,42].…”