Say Cheeeeese to ride a Wheelchair!

We had seen famous physicist Stephen William Hawking, controls his wheelchair using a muscle of face. Powered by robotics, it can improvise life of people by connecting them with smart technology. Researchers are working on developing products that can help people in various ways. One among them is offering assistance to those who are unable to walk or move properly. Wheelchair is one way but, it requires strength of the person to move. Certain developed wheelchair comes with motor and can be controlled by button or lever. Still a few patients, who are not capable of using hands, can face issue in riding it. They require rather advance wheelchair that can move with least effort.

To curb issue with wheelchair control, Hoo.Box is a robotic startup that came up with a new idea of assistive robotics. Located in Brazil, it has introduced a wheel chair that can be controlled by facial expressions, head movements, speech recognition, eye movement & heat map. Users can customize the control by programming their facial expressions and head movements.

Researcher Paulo Pinheiro offers a demo video how comfortable it gets to operate wheelchair using his expressions. Called as Wheeli, it is capable of identifying 80 major points of face with the help of Intel RealSense technology. Each key impression act as a command for 5 key movements like forward, backward, right, left and stop. The technology is ideal and helpful for those who are limited to move because of disease and illness, and cannot control wheelchair.

Takeaways:

• Wheelie is a Wheelchair that can identify facial expressions, head movements, speech recognition and eye movements to move.
• Users can feed their expressions to assign 5 movements of wheelchair.