Human-machine interface for wheelchair control with EMG and its evaluation

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to develop a powered wheelchair controller based on EMG for users with high-level spinal cord injury. EMG is very naturally measured when the user indicating a certain direction and the force information which will be used for the speed of wheelchair is easily extracted from EMG. Furthermore, the emergency situation based on EMG will be checked relatively ease. We classified the pre-defined motions such as rest case, forward movement, left movement, and right movement by fuzzy min-max neural networks (FMMNN). This classification results and evaluation results with real users shows the feasibility of EMG as an input interface for powered wheelchair.