TY - JOUR
T1 - Usability studies of an egocentric vision-based robotic wheelchair
AU - Kutbi, Mohammed
AU - Du, Xiaoxue
AU - Chang, Yizhe
AU - Sun, Bo
AU - Agadakos, Nikolaos
AU - Li, Haoxiang
AU - Hua, Gang
AU - Mordohai, Philippos
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).
PY - 2020
Y1 - 2020
N2 - Motivated by the need to improve the quality of life for the elderly and disabled individuals who rely on wheelchairs for mobility, and who may have limited or no hand functionality at all, we propose an egocentric computer vision based co-robot wheelchair to enhance their mobility without hand usage. The robot is built using a commercially available powered wheelchair modified to be controlled by head motion. Head motion is measured by tracking an egocentric camera mounted on the user's head and faces outward. Compared with previous approaches to hands-free mobility, our system provides a more natural human robot interface because it enables the user to control the speed and direction of motion in a continuous fashion, as opposed to providing a small number of discrete commands. This article presents three usability studies, which were conducted on 37 subjects. The first two usability studies focus on comparing the proposed control method with existing solutions while the third study was conducted to assess the effectiveness of training subjects to operate the wheelchair over several sessions. A limitation of our studies is that they have been conducted with healthy participants. Our findings, however, pave the way for further studies with subjects with disabilities.
AB - Motivated by the need to improve the quality of life for the elderly and disabled individuals who rely on wheelchairs for mobility, and who may have limited or no hand functionality at all, we propose an egocentric computer vision based co-robot wheelchair to enhance their mobility without hand usage. The robot is built using a commercially available powered wheelchair modified to be controlled by head motion. Head motion is measured by tracking an egocentric camera mounted on the user's head and faces outward. Compared with previous approaches to hands-free mobility, our system provides a more natural human robot interface because it enables the user to control the speed and direction of motion in a continuous fashion, as opposed to providing a small number of discrete commands. This article presents three usability studies, which were conducted on 37 subjects. The first two usability studies focus on comparing the proposed control method with existing solutions while the third study was conducted to assess the effectiveness of training subjects to operate the wheelchair over several sessions. A limitation of our studies is that they have been conducted with healthy participants. Our findings, however, pave the way for further studies with subjects with disabilities.
KW - Assistive technologies
KW - Computer vision
KW - Computer vision tasks
KW - Computing methodologies
KW - Human-centered computing
KW - Interactive systems and tools
KW - Social and professional topics
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U2 - 10.1145/3399434
DO - 10.1145/3399434
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85096356922
VL - 10
JO - ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction
JF - ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction
IS - 1
M1 - A4
ER -