Adaptable navigational assistance for intelligent wheelchairs by means of an implicit personalized user model

Elderly and disabled people can experience considerable difficulties when driving a powered wheelchair, especially if they do not possess the fine steering capacities that are required to perform certain manoeuvres, like avoiding obstacles or docking at tables. In order to help these people, several “intelligent” wheelchairs have been developed in the past, meaning that a powered wheelchair was endowed with the abilities to provide navigational assistance to its user. In such a scenario, control over the wheelchair is shared between the user and the intelligent assistance. The problem of the existing intelligent wheelchairs is, however, that the rules for assistance are hard-coded and by consequence not adaptable to the personal handicap and needs of a specific user. Therefore, this paper proposes a new, more user-centered approach to shared wheelchair control. The presented framework executes two tasks: it continuously estimates the user’s intention and it determines whether the user needs assistance to achieve that intention. An implicit user model is introduced and incorporated in the framework, in order to make the execution of both tasks adaptable to a specific user. This paper presents the proposed framework, along with experimental results in simulation and on a real wheelchair.