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RE: My Final Year Project : SIP AND PUFF CONTROL BASED WHEELCHAIR
This would be incredibly useful in some specific cases of disability. Would there be some way of adapting it for people who do not have control of respiration?
Examples of this would be cases where there are spinal injuries involving levels C4 and above or degenerative diseases where there is a total loss of neurological control (but cranial nerves can be spared until the late stages).
In these cases facial/eye muscles and tongue movements could be an alternative.
Actually this question was raised by one of the panel members to whom we were presenting this project. He asked what if someone is asthmatic and cannot have a controlled breathing system?
First of all user don't have to breathe continuously to keep wheechair operational. For instance, user just need to a hard puff once in order to drive chair in forward motion, similarly a soft puff is needed in order to turn left which would be continuous, the wheelchair will keep on turning until user is giving an input of soft puff.
Apart from that we have also installed a kill switch for safety measures. If something unusual happens user can press it to halt the operations.
Right but in some cases people can't control their breathing at all - I was just wondering if there was some way to apply this to them.
Before operating this wheelchair the user must undergo proper training for at least 3 4 days under supervision.