Bangalore: An IIT Gandhinagar student has come up with an android app that can help people paralyzed neck down to have greater freedom of mobility, reports TOI.

Pritesh Sankhe, a final year Electrical Engineering student has tried to use Smartphone based on android to execute verbal and gesture commands from a paralyzed person that can regulate the mobility of wheel chair by incorporate the technology of robotics and the simplicity of mobile phones. Though his app is still in the prototype phase, he’s hopeful of soon developing it to a full-fledged system.

"Smartphones are everywhere nowadays and people are using it innovatively. Efforts have been made to improve human-robot interaction but, at the moment, the best example of this is may be an onboard computer for paralysed people. How about shrinking the computer to the size of a smartphone and employing it for day-to-day tasks?" said Sankhe.

The project is under supervision of his guide Uttama Lahiri and is based on the framework that the users of app cannot move their limbs but are capable of limited movement of the head and neck.

"We place a bright-coloured object on the user's forehead that can be easily identified by the smartphone camera. Then we wrote a software that would track the blob's movements and replicate it to command the wheelchair," Sankhe said. He also added that the app will learn the regular routes of the user and it gets activated by just verbal commands. The wheelchair is to check its position along the route and make necessary changes.

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