User and social interfaces by observing human faces for intelligent wheelchairs

With the increase in the number of senior citizens, there is a growing demand for human-friendly wheelchairs as mobility aids. Thus several intelligent wheelchairs have been proposed recently. However, they consider friendliness only to their users. Since wheelchairs move among people, they should also be friendly to people around them. In other words, they should have a social-friendly interface as well as a user-friendly interface. We propose an intelligent wheelchair that is friendly to both user and people around it by observing the faces of both user and others. The user can control it by turning his/her face in the direction where he/she would like to turn. It observes pedestrian's face and changes its collision avoidance method depending on whether or not he/she notices it. Here we assume that the pedestrian notices the wheelchair if his/her face often faces toward the wheelchair.