A smart walker for the frail visually impaired

This paper describes the design of a smart mobility aid for frail, visually impaired people. The device is based on the concept of a walker or rollator-a walking frame with wheels. This work is motivated by the fact the frail visually impaired have extreme difficulty using conventional mobility aids such as guide dogs or long canes. The device, which is called PAM-AID (Personal Adaptive Mobility Aid) has two modes of operation, manual and assistive. In manual mode the device behaves very much like a normal walker and, in addition, provides the user with information on the environment via a speech interface. In assistive mode, the PAM-AID assumes control of the steering and navigates safely around obstacles. The PAM-AID was evaluated in residential homes for the elderly.

[1]  Iwan Ulrich,et al.  VFH+: reliable obstacle avoidance for fast mobile robots , 1998, Proceedings. 1998 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.98CH36146).

[2]  Claude E. Shannon,et al.  A mathematical theory of communication , 1948, MOCO.

[3]  Johan Forsberg,et al.  Mobile robot navigation using the range-weighted Hough transform , 1995, IEEE Robotics Autom. Mag..

[4]  L. Kay,et al.  A sonar aid to enhance spatial perception of the blind: engineering design and evaluation , 1974 .

[5]  Robin Ficke.  Digest of Data on Persons with Disabilities. , 1992 .

[6]  Linda P. Fried,et al.  The Women's Health and Aging Study: Health and Social Characteristics of Older Women with Disability , 1995 .

[7]  Oussama Khatib,et al.  Real-Time Obstacle Avoidance for Manipulators and Mobile Robots , 1986 .

[8]  Judea Pearl,et al.  Probabilistic reasoning in intelligent systems - networks of plausible inference , 1991, Morgan Kaufmann series in representation and reasoning.

[9]  Oussama Khatib,et al.  Real-Time Obstacle Avoidance for Manipulators and Mobile Robots , 1985, Autonomous Robot Vehicles.

[10]  Reid Simmons,et al.  Autonomous task control for mobile robots , 1990, Proceedings. 5th IEEE International Symposium on Intelligent Control 1990.

[11]  Kenneth M. Dawson-Howe,et al.  The application of robotics to a mobility aid for the elderly blind , 1998, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[12]  Iwan Ulrich,et al.  The GuideCane-a computerized travel aid for the active guidance of blind pedestrians , 1997, Proceedings of International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[13]  Gerard Lacey,et al.  A Robotic Mobility Aid for Frail Visually Impaired People , 2022 .