An ingenious wheelchair with a drone attachment

Assistive devices such as wheelchairs enhance mobility, accessibility, or independence for users, and also improve quality of life. They enable the user to become mobile, remain healthy, participate fully in community life, as well as reduce dependence on others.

Therefore, there is a need to continually improve wheelchairs.

The innovative wheelchair includes a detachable drone, which disengages from the wheelchair when required. The drone includes a visible light camera, an infrared camera and a radar based object-detection device.

The user may use the drone to to survey a target region (e.g., surveillance region, a target surveillance region, a travel route region, and the like.)

The drone also includes speakers that are used to provide an audio signal indicative of a presence, arrival, or imminent arrival of an associated wheelchair.

Further, the drone may fly above and at a certain distance from the wheelchair. The drone may capture images of a travel path and identify useful information such as obstacle information, wheelchair accessibility information, availability of assistive technology information, travel route traffic information etc.

This is cool. But what we actually need is flying chairs shown in WALL-E. Until then, we need to keep innovating.

US20160199983