CHAPTER ONE

                                                   INTRODUCTION

1.1              BACKGROUND OF  THE STUDY

People are intensely working on finding new ways of communicating with machines. However, a major headway was observed when gestures were used for this communications. A keypad is a non-verbal form of communication in which the input of a particular button conveys a particular message. (Kanuri et al, 2012).

Among the large number of progress made in the medical sector, only a few actually focuses on helping physically disabled people to communicate. Though monitoring systems make it easier for doctors to collect and observe a patient’s vitals, there aren’t many options for actual verbal communication for disabled patients (Desai et al, 2016). Those that are physically handicapped find it really challenging to find their way through their
environments or their surrounding without the help of others (Gangopadhyay et al, 2013). A large number of persons in the world today have some form of disability. This matches about 15% of the world's population (Srishti et al, 2015).

At the beginning of robot technology, the primary way to interact with a robot was through a computer program. This called for extensive hard work from the programmers and developers. With the advancement in science and robotics, keypad based recognition came into life. Keypad recognition can be considered as a way for a disable person to communicate with people through the push of a keypad. This has therefore maximised the need for text interfaces, button-based controls and Graphical User Interface (GUI) (Khan, 2015).

1.2       STATEMENT OF PROBLEM

Here in Nigeria and in various part of the world, there are a wide range of hospitals and Non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) set up mainly to assist disabled people. These are individuals who do not possess full body control, just like every normal person. Hence, we suggest a system that helps disabled persons display a message by the push of a keypad or button.

1.3       AIM AND OBJECTIVES OF THE SYSTEM

The objective of this project is to develop and construct a keypad-based message conveyor hardware device for disabled people that will:

·         To make life easier for relief agencies taking care of disabled people,

·         To make life easier for these disabled people,

·         To enhance communication between patients and doctors.

1.4       SCOPE OF STUDY

This project will be limited to a specific set of instructions to be displayed by the message conveyor device due to the time and resource and financial constraint available for its development, and would have Babcock University Teaching Hospital as its deployment location and testing ground.

1.5       SIGNIFICANCE OF STUDY

The development of this project will go a long way to relieving nurses and medical practitioners from the stress of communicating with the disabled people, and will also be helpful in assisting these special individuals with getting aid and assistance more quickly and readily as this device would be equipped with a buzzer sound for alert purposes. This device can also be used by people who are not disabled. i.e, patients who are critically down or in the ICU unit can also make use of this device

1.6       METHODOLOGY

The microcontroller displays the associated message on the Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) screen. It sounds a buzzer along with message as soon as it receives a push of the keypad from the accelerometer. The patient keypad device consists of an RF transmitter in order to transfer the data signal. An RF receiver on the other side receives the data and then decodes it before passing it to the microcontroller for processing the input and responding to it (http://nevonprojects.com/keypad-based-message-conveyer-for-paralyticdisabled-project/).

1.7       EXPECTED OUTCOME

At the end of this project, a working keypad based message conveyor hardware device for disabled people would have been developed and would be ready for use by the Babcock University Teaching Hospital.

1.8       ORGANIZATION OF SUBSEQUENT CHAPTERS

This project will include the following chapters, as introduced below:

Chapter Two

Literature review: in this chapter, we will review several books, journals, materials and other literatures on Motion and Keypad Based Message Conveyor for Disabled. We will review different theories and how applicable they are to our system. We will also consider existing systems to compare their similarities, differences, the pros and the cons.

Chapter Three

Analysis and Design: in this chapter, we will discuss our design processes, we will analyse the whole system design and how we go about the execution of the system designs. This will include interface design, database design and system programming.

Chapter Four

Implementation, testing and evaluation: after building the system, we shall discuss all the specifications of the developed system built, the requirement, setting up the system and eventual testing of the system.

Chapter Five

Summary and Conclusions: this chapter shall conclude the project; we will be summarizing all the process of completing the Keypad Based Message Conveyor for Disabled system and giving recommendation and future enhancement of the current system.