Design of Voice Controlled Prosthetic Arm

Abstract

Prosthesis is an artificial device, used to replace a disabled or defective body part, which can be of any reason like lost accidently, birth physical disability, disease etc. Current solutions for the control of active upper-limb prostheses are mostly based on EMG signals acquisition and processing and on electronic switches. Even though efficient for most clinical cases. These solutions can be unsatisfactorily for the control of prostheses with multiple joints, highly effort requirements to perform even simple activities, costly and takes long time for adaptation and training. Voice is the most popular and easy tool for communication and simple tool for man machine interface, as it is user friendly. In this study the hardware of voice controlled prosthetic arm was designed and implemented. For man machine interface through speech a voice recognition module was used. The prosthetic arm responds to the voice command from its user to perform any movements functions. It integrates a microcontroller, microphone, voice recognition module and DC servo motors. By using the system, the user is able to move the hand by simply speak to the arm microphone. This study presents Voice-control as a possible solution by designing in implementing a hardware of voice controlled prosthetic arm, which was initially trained for eight voice commands to control the movements of hand. To accomplish this task, A mikroC language program is written and stored in the PIC controller's memory. In order to recognize the spoken words, the voice recognition processor must be trained with the word spoken out by the user who is going to use the arm.