An Intelligent Autonomous Wheelchair for Hospital

The issues of healthcare worker shortages and constant rise of patients leading to drastic increment in workloads within the hospital has become a known topic recently. At the same time, the population of disabled people is seen to be increasing, resulting in higher demands for wheelchairs. However, most hospitals are still using conventional manually controlled wheelchair for their patients. As a result, the disabled patients would have to wait for a long time for hospital staffs to help move them to their desired destination. Therefore, the idea of a handy autonomous wheelchair for hospitals had been proposed and developed. The features include: (1) Wheelchair line following navigation using colour sensors. (2) Obstacle detection and avoidance using ultrasonic sensors and stereo camera. (3) Emergency signal transmissions using Wi-Fi and Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT). (4) Voice command using microphone to receive the command and execute the respective operation. The auto- mated wheelchair system developed was also designed so that the data extracted on the wheelchair can be monitored remotely at the base station using the concept of Internet-of-Things (IoT).