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Genie Joystick
Do you have a special needs child who needs an alternative to a standard joystick control for use with a powered wheelchair?
Play and Exploration are the cornerstones of learning. A child with poor co-ordination and control, communication problems, or who cannot walk, has less chance to explore and play and faces greater challenges when they do so.
IDEAS for FUN and GAMES –with the Smart Wheelchair – The smart wheelchair can provide a fun, exciting and motivating environment in which to learn. There are a whole host of games and activities which have been created to assist with this learning process – click here for more information
Mobility is fun, exciting and motivating. Being able to move opens up new opportunities for play and exploration. Mobile children and adults are more curious, active, assertive and learn more effectively. People with very severe physical, communication, sensory or learning difficulties have even more to gain from powered mobility because they have very few other ways to demonstration their individuality and experience control. Yet controlling a powered wheelchair is hard for many people with severe disabilities.
- When you are learning new and difficult tasks, it helps to be able to share some of the load with someone or something else. In this case your partner is the Smart Wheelchair
- Some skills which you might use for communication purposes (such as switching and tracking) should have to be relearned for mobility purposes and vice versa – Skills transfer
- It should be possible to progress gently from simpler to more complex tasks as your skill level increases.
- How much control you or the wheelchair has is up to you: you can change you mind and take more control yourself, or decide to hand over more responsibility to the wheelchair at any time.
What sort of work might you share? When you’re driving a powered wheelchair there are several decisions to be made and tasks to be performed.
Where you want to go
What sequence of movements must be made in order to get there?
To make these movements, you must be able to start, stop and steer the wheelchair. You might also have to try to avoid unexpected obstacles or get out of trouble if you do collide with them. The Smart wheelchair is able to help with some of the more simple tasks to do with moving or dealing with collisions. The central idea is that you concentrate on learning and practising one task while the wheelchair takes care of another. For example, you might want the wheelchair to deal with bumps, or guide you from room to room, while you get on with the important things like deciding when to move.
Line Follower
The Line follower is a black box mounted on the front of the chair, with infra-red sensors which detect retro reflective tape. The sensors work regardless of background light and don’t care whether the line of on dark or light floor coverings, whether carpet or lino. The Line Followers function is to detect where the line is in relation to the chair so that the chair can follow it.
The line follower might be considered for several reasons and for several groups of children
- If a child has learning difficulties, then the Line Follower is simple to operate: the child just needs to know that is he or she presses the switch, the destination will be reached
- To motivate a child who seems unexcited by their wheelchair. One of the main reasons for the child’s lack of interest may be that he or she doesn’t connect the simple movements of the chair with going anywhere useful or interesting – the basic understanding of the use of mobility is not there. By pressing the switch and travelling around, the usefulness and hopefully motivation of mobility are experienced with the minimum cognitive, physical or perceptual demands on the pilot
- For those children who have very limited physical control skills, the Line follower enables the child to move from place to place without the need for supervision.
- Children who do have good control skills but suffer from fatigue and cannot maintain a high level of control for long period. They can use the Line follower like a bus, which can be joined and left at any point, to reduce the effort involved in moving around.
- using the chair with or without collision sensors may be too complex to understand: in order to move around the child must have an idea of where they wish to go, of the sequence of movements that will take them there, and the ability to correct this
Your Assistant
You can think of the Smart wheelchair as an assistant which can take some of the load from you whilst you are learning to drive or communicate and which makes it simpler to transfer skills from one task
Beat the vicious circle
For a person with all these problems, learning is difficult. It’s a vicious circle.
Lack of physical control means no mobility – no mobility restricts the ability to explore the surrounding thus leading to an inability to learn how to learn.
Communicating with others involves new learning. Tasks like tracking
The Smart Wheelchair was designed to help by providing:-
A common learning environment for communication, mobility and some structured play and exploration, in which skills transfer from task to task
Some relief from the responsibility for mundane mobility tasks, whilst new skills are required.
Smart Wheelchair Brochure
Smile Platform
Improve driving skills with your own wheelchair. Based around a Dynamic DX system, the platform is very maneuverable and can be controlled by the user from a single switch or up to 4 switches. Scanning devices are also easily integrated into the system.The Smart-Box is the intelligence behind the platform capabilities. It acts as the hub of the system and features a comprehensive range of user adjustable controls such as line following, speed, sensors, auditory confirmations and motion controls. Its modular design also means that the Smart-Box system can be easily fitted to other compatible powerchairs. More details . .