Intelligent wheelchair using visual information on human faces

With the increase of senior citizens, there is a growing demand for human-friendly wheelchairs as mobility aids. The paper proposes a concept of an intelligent wheelchair to meet this need. It can understand human intentions by observing the user's nonverbal behaviors and can move in accordance with the user's wish with minimum human operations. The paper also describes our experimental robotic wheelchair system. Human intentions appear most on the face. Thus, the experimental system observes the human face, computing its direction. As the first step toward the intelligent wheelchair, we have made experiments on controlling the system's motion by the face direction. Experimental results prove our approach promising.