Voice Activated Appliances for Severely Disabled Persons

People with severe speech and motor impairment due to cerebral palsy are great difficult to move independently and also cannot control home electric devices. Computer has much to offer people with disability, but the standard human-machine interface (e.g. keyboard and mouse) is inaccessible to this population. In this chapter, we describe a speech recognition interface for the control of powered wheelchair and home automation systems via severely disabled person’s voices. In particular, we consider that our system can be operated by inarticulate speech produced by persons with severe cerebral palsy or quadriplegia in realenvironment. The aim of our research is divided two targets. One is easy to control of various home appliances by voice, and the other is to enable severely disabled person’s movement independently using voice activated powered wheelchair. At first, Home automation system product for intelligent home is increasingly getting very common by the help of intelligent home technologies that increased easy, safety and comfort. Moreover, home automation is an absolute benefit and can improve the quality of life for the user. Home automation houses have been developed to apply new technologies in real environment, such as Welfare Techno Houses (Tamura et al., 2007), Intelligent Sweet Home (Park et al., 2007), Smart House (West et al., 2005). Interfaces based on gestures or voices have been widely used for home automation. However, gesture recognition based on vision technologies depends critically on the external illumination conditions. And gesture recognition is difficult or impossible for people suffering from severe motor impairments, such as paraplegia and tremors. Recently, a voice-activated system using commercial voicerecognition hardware in a low-noise environment has been developed for disabled persons capable of clear speech (Ding & Cooper, 2005). The next, powered wheelchairs provide unique mobility for the disabled and elderly with motor impairments. Sometimes, the joystick is a useless manipulation tool because the severely disabled cannot operate it smoothly. Using natural voice commands, like ``move forward'' or ``move left'' relieves the user from precise motion control of the wheelchair. Voice activated powered wheelchair is required safety manipulation with high speech recognition accuracy because the accident can occur by a misrecognition. Although current speech recognition technology has reported high performance, it is not sufficient for safe voice-controlled powered wheelchair movement by inarticulate speech affected by severe O pe n A cc es s D at ab as e w w w .in te ch w eb .o rg