Mustapha, Baharuddin (2016) Automated Obstacle Detection System for Safe Locomotion. PhD thesis, Victoria University.

Abstract

The dramatic growth in aging population has opened up the opportunity for engineers and scientists to develop sophisticated devices, especially in supporting the elderly for safety navigation. Mobility assistive device is a supportive tool which can assist the elderly during walking either indoor or outdoor environment. The number of fall-related diseases among the elderly could be reduced using sensor based mobility assistive devices. These machines will grow further as new supportive tools of electronic devices for daily locomotion, and become more feasible and pervasive. Sensor embedded mobility assistive devices with wireless technology compatibilities are the solution to accommodate the elderly’s safety in navigation. The newly designed system must be highly reliable, efficient, hands-free, cheap and most importantly, practical for use in real life activities. These technologies are said to bring a number of significant improvements into the next generation of mobility assistive devices, including miniaturization, low power consumption, full integration of system capability and low cost of production. Miniaturization is a great advantage as it means that the devices or systems should require only small volumes of space and suitability to embed insole of shoes. With low power consumption, only small batteries might be needed as power supply or even energy scavenging can be sufficient to power them, if not a combination of these. As full system integration on a single chip is also possible, signal processing and computation can be performed on the same chip with greatly improved overall system performance. Most interestingly, the low per-unit cost is what business and consumers are looking for in every product and this has been a significant trend.

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