Autonomous mobile vehicles devoted to improve the mobility of users with severe motor impairments that experience difficulties in driving traditional electric wheelchairs. A smart wheelchair typically consists of a standard powered wheelchair to which a collection of sensors and a computer (for control purposes) have been added.
Published in Chapter:
Trends in Adaptive Interface Design for Smart Wheelchairs
Julio Abascal (University of the Basque Country-Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea, Spain), Borja Bonail (University of the Basque Country-Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea, Spain), Daniel Cagigas (Universidad de Sevilla, Spain), Nestor Garay (University of the Basque Country-Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea, Spain), and Luis Gardeazabal (University of the Basque Country-Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea, Spain)
Copyright: © 2008
|Pages: 19
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-59904-871-0.ch042
Abstract
This chapter introduces the main trends in the design of interfaces for smart wheelchairs. It stresses the importance of taking into account their similarity with autonomous mobile robots and the restrictions posed by the special characteristics of the users (people with severe motor and speech restrictions) and the task (indoor assisted navigation). With this background, the main features of the user-wheelchair interface are discussed, justifying the need for the adoption of an adaptive approach. The TetraNauta smart wheelchair interface design is used to illustrate the design of user, context, and task models. In addition, it describes some mechanisms to enhance the communication rate when a single-switch-scanning input device is used (scanning rate dynamic adaptation and word prediction). The chapter finishes with a discussion of the influence of new navigation models, such as the behaviour-based one, in the design of the user interface.