Voice Recognition and Switch Controlled Environmental Control Units for Quadriplegics and Physically Disabled

What is an Environmental Control Unit for a Quadriplegic or Physically Disabled Person?

Before I go into what a environmental control unit is, I want to put out a few thoughts:

You need to know up front that environmental control units can be expensive. A typical fully functional ECU with installation and training will start at around $10,000. It can be much more. You also have to consider maintenance costs such as microphone replacement. Your environmental control unit is going to need repair. Either the parts of the system that are mounted on your wheelchair are going to get snagged on something or your nursing assistant is going to be too rough on things and break a wire. Something will happen that will need to be replaced.
Forget what you see in the movies. You are not going to be able to talk out loud in any room in your house, saying whatever you want to some invisible smart home computer with its own personality who will be able to correctly interpret, understand, and perform any task you want. Please, please, please wipe that image from your brain. It just doesn't exist.
Environmental control units require a lot of work on your part. Yes, you have to work to make the experience successful. You have to learn how to talk to the unit, you have to learn all the commands, you have to learn the command menus and submenus, and you have to know how to handle the equipment and more importantly how to tell your assistants how to handle the equipment.
Environmental control units are not as good as a human. The human being is in some sense the perfect robot and as an ECU installer, I could not compete against a human and win. If you can yell at your wife to put on the ballgame and she does it, that's going to be much easier than saying all the commands correctly it takes to get an ECU to do the same thing. This goes back to item 3 above. Environmental control units are an invaluable tool to allow someone to live independently but they require you to be flexible and work on your part.

An environmental control unit (ECU) is a piece of assistive technology that allows a person who is physically disabled to control their living environment. Since a person with a physical disability cannot always pick up the telephone receiver, flick on the light switch, or press the keys on the remote control, an environmental control unit is the technological bridge that allows that to happen. Each particular environmental control unit has its own features but the typical environmental control unit allows the person who is physically disabled the ability to independently control such things as:

operate their hospital bed
turn on/off lights and small appliances
answer and make telephone calls
control the TV, stereo, DVD player, etc.
open doors
control the heating and air conditioning

Their are two basic methods of controlling an environmental control unit:

switch control - the user activates an accessible switch to control the environmental control unit. This is done through menu scanning, the menu items are presented to the physically disabled user one at a time and the user times his selection to when the feature he/she wants is presented. There can be submenus as well to allow more features specific to a particular menu item. The menus are presented either visually on a screen or through a speaker so the user can hear the choice. The first time the user activates the accessible switch, the unit will scan through the available choices in menu format such as "lights, television, telephone, ..." When the user sees on the display screen or hears the menu choice, the switch is activated again to cause the environmental control unit to perform that action or in turn present another menu of choices to the user. Switch control is by far much more reliable than voice control. The main problem with switch control is that the menus are presented one at a time, making the process of picking the action you want slow. However switch control is a much more reliable control method.

voice control - the user speaks the commands to the environmental control unit " Turn on bedroom light." Voice is a much faster method of controlling an environmental control unit but of course has the negative issues inherent in voice recognition (misunderstood commands, microphone required to be mounted near user's face, etc.)

Each manufacturer typically has models available for switch, voice, or switch and voice control. The advantage to a unit that does both is that a user can use the faster voice recognition method on most days but when the person is sick or their voice changes throughout the day, the switch can be used.

How does an environmental control unit allow a Quadriplegic or Physically Disabled Person to control their environment?

An environmental control unit allows the disabled person to control their environment from a single centralized control station, equivalent to a master remote control. The disabled person can either use their voice or access a single accessible switch to issue commands to environmental control unit. The environmental control unit processes the commands and in turn sends out the control signals to the appropriate device (TV, bed, telephone, etc.) All environmental control units consist of a base station that can be a desktop computer running special software or a custom control box housing electronic circuit boards. The base station is usually mounted in the bedroom on a shelf, night stand, or chest of drawers. It's best to locate it out of the way so that daily cleaning or physical movement by staff do not interfere with it. Occasionally the base station is located in the bedroom.

On some systems, separate from the base station is a wireless system mounted on the wheelchair which gives the person access to the environmental control unit while they are up in the chair. So the person has access to the environmental control unit while in bed or while in the wheelchair. The base station does not move. While in the wheelchair the person will speak into a microphone mounting on the wheelchair and the voice is transmitted wirelessly back to the base station.

Some environmental control units have to be moved to wherever the person using it is located. There is no wireless remote accessory. So if they are in bed using the environmental control unit and get up into their wheelchair, the environmental control unit has to be moved so that it is physically mounted on the wheelchair. Obviously this can be a pain and can lead to damage from the back and forth moving. Also the environmental control unit is physically located on the wheelchair so if it is bumped into walls, the environmental control unit can be damaged. Some users who have their environmental control unit mounted on their wheelchair simply place the chair close enough to the bed so that they can operate their chair mounted system from bed.

I want to thank BlueRobot for being nice enough to publicly offer the CSS formats that I used in creating this website.

Voice Recognition and Switch Controlled Environmental Control Units for Quadriplegics and Physically Disabled

What is an Environmental Control Unit for a Quadriplegic or Physically Disabled Person?

How does an environmental control unit allow a Quadriplegic or Physically Disabled Person to control their environment?