Mysore: People suffering with physical disability due to illness, accidents or any other disability are in need of wheelchair. Patients who are suffering from low or medium level disability are able to use manual or electrical wheel-chairs. 

In severe cases of disability, the wheel-chair lacks mobility and the person cannot use wheel-chair and has to depend on external help for movement. Tremendous leaps have been made in the field of wheel-chair technology. However, even these significant advances haven’t been able to help quadriplegics navigate  wheel-chair unassisted. 

A group of final year Electrical and Electronics Engineering students — A.P. Mudappa, M. Jason, B. Shana and A.S. Sangeetha — from Vidyavardhaka College of Engineering (VVCE), Mysuru, under the guidance of Assistant Professor V.P. Reshma and Dr. Shoba Shankar, Head, Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, have developed an ‘Automated Wheel-chair with Gesture Control.’ The main purpose of their project was to develop a wheel-chair at low cost which is useful for physically disabled person with his hand gesture recognition using acceleration technology. 

The wheel-chair can be controlled by simple hand gestures. It employs a sensor which controls the wheel-chair hand gestures made by the user and interprets the motion intended by user and moves accordingly. Atmega328p based Arduino, Gyro sensor is interfaced with it. In case of emergency if the sensor doesn’t work, one can operate the wheel-chair through voice. Voice-operated wheel-chairs are also available in the market but are very costly. The cost of this wheel-chair project is about Rs. 15,000.