Development of a Voice Controlled Electric Wheelchair to Aid the Movement of the Physically Challenged

Nigeria is said to have the highest number of physically challenged in Africa and second only to India in the world. Traditional Electrical Wheel Chair has some limitations. In order to assist the physically handicapped, this paper presents the development of a voice controlled wheelchair. The user can control the wheelchair by voice commands, such as “jagaba (go forward)” in Hausa. A grammar-based recognition parser was used in the system. The system comprises of a wheelchair motorize by a DC motor, works on inputs such as voice commands via an android phone and navigates according to the command and battery powered. Voice command input was taken from android mobile and converted into text which is transmitted to microcontroller via Bluetooth module to control the operation of DC motors. Also an IR detection system was used to detect the obstacle in the path of wheelchair to avoid its collision. The chair enables the handicapped person to independently move around. A running experiment with three (3) persons was carried out on speech recognition. 95.4% and 94.0% of the movement command and the verification command were obtained respectively