A self-reliance assistive tool for disable people

Abstract

In order to improve the self-reliance capacity of physically disabled and elderly people, this paper develops an assistive tool by using hand posture control. The assistive tool is composed of an electric wheelchair and a 6 axis-robot arm. The power wheelchair provides the mobility for challenging people, while the robot arm helps people to grab objects in their daily lives. The functions of the assistive tool are operated by a control glove which senses the hand posture by inertial and electronic sensors. The operational status of the glove is transformed to the corresponding action for the wheelchair and robot arm. The benefit of the developed assistive tool is easy use for disabled and elderly people without needing difficult operational learning. Several experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the design in this paper.