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In-Depth Information
Patient Classification and Automatic Configuration
of an Intelligent Wheelchair
Brígida Mónica Faria
1,2
, Luís Paulo Reis
3,4
, Nuno Lau
1
, João Couto Soares
4
,
and Sérgio Vasconcelos
4
1
Dep. Elect., Telecomunicações e Informática (DETI/UA), Inst. Eng. Electrónica e Telemática
de Aveiro (IEETA), Universidade de Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal
{monica.faria,nunolau}@ua.pt
2
Escola Superior de Tecnologia da Saúde do Porto, Instituto Politécnico do Porto (ESTSP/IPP),
Vila Nova de Gaia, Portugal
3
Escola de Engenharia da Universidade do Minho - DSI, Universidade do Minho
(EEUM/DSI), Guimarães, Portugal
lpreis@dsi.uminho.pt
4
Laboratório de Inteligência Artificial e Ciência de Computadores (LIACC),
Universidade do Porto, Porto, Portugal
{joao.couto.soares,ei05074}@fe.up.pt
Abstract.
The access to instruments that allow higher autonomy to people is in-
creasing and the scientific community is giving special attention on designing and
developing such systems. Intelligent Wheelchairs (IW) are an example of how the
knowledge on robotics and artificial intelligence may be applied to this field. IWs
can have different interfaces and multimodal interfaces enabling several inputs
such as head movements, joystick, facial expressions and voice commands. This
paper describes the foundations for creating a simple procedure for extracting user
profiles, which can be used to adequately select the best IW command mode for
each user. The methodology consists on an interactive wizard composed by a flexi-
ble set of simple tasks presented to the user, and a method for extracting and ana-
lyzing the user's execution of those tasks. The results showed that it is possible to
extract simple user profiles, using the proposed method.
Keywords:
Classification, Patient, Intelligent Wheelchair, Knowledge Disco-
very.
1
Introduction
The population with physical disabilities has earned more relevance and has attracted
the attention of international health care organizations, universities and companies
interested in developing and adapting new products. The current tendency reflects the
demand for an increase on health and rehabilitation services, in a way that senior and
handicapped individuals might become more and more independent when performing
quotidian tasks.
Regardless the age, mobility is a fundamental characteristic for every human being.
Children with disabilities are very often deprived of important opportunities and face
