Development of intelligent wheelchairs for persons with severe disabilities: what I can do is beautiful

In this paper, we describe development of electric powered wheelchairs for persons with severe disability who can not drive currently commercialized wheelchairs. One of the important approaches of this development is closing the gap between persons with severe disability and advanced technologies; such as voice recognition, image recognition, EMG detection, stereo vision technologies. Each advanced technologies was involved into human interface and security system of the electric powered wheelchairs. All of them were evaluated with actual users in real world of the use. In order to make success on development of orphan products, it was revealed that user participation is important.