An Autonomous Drone-Controlled Wheelchair? No Thanks.

This is the best our brightest minds can come up with?

The question came to my mind while reading an article about a Swiss project to build an autonomous wheelchair assisted by drones with integrated artificial intelligence. While each of those tech buzzwords conveys some degree of coolness on its own, together they make no sense. Wheelchairs are already conspicuous enough — now you want to add a drone constantly buzzing and hovering overhead? Unless it can fire some sort of crowd control at gawking bystanders, no thank you.

If the researchers and engineers behind the Self-driving AI-Assisted Drone chair had spoken with anyone who has ever used a power wheelchair, they would have learned this. Instead, what we’re left with is another ill-conceived example of what happens when they don’t listen to the very people they are supposedly trying to help.

The best evidence of how out of touch these people are? Their own words. The head of the Swiss research team behind the SAAD chair bills it as a “visionary and disruptive project” that “will enable people with physical and sensory disabilities to move around independently, without being carried like objects.”

First, there is nothing visionary or disruptive about this project, unless you count the drone as disruptive in a purely literal sense. Much more competent and connected engineers have been experimenting with autonomous design and AI for years. LUCI Mobility has been selling an add-on for four years that uses sensors to keep your chair from running into walls or off curbs. Dr. Rory Cooper and his team at the Human Engineering Research Laboratories in Pittsburgh have been using lidar — a laser-based remote sensing technology — and sensors to make a smarter chair, and others have demonstrated how AI routing can empower wheelchair users.

Second, the fact that this engineer thinks we see ourselves as “being carried like objects” betrays how completely out of touch he is. I’ve heard fellow wheelchair users express a wide range of opinions on their relationships with their chairs, from love — “My chair completes me and empowers me to live life how I want,” to loathing — “I wish I never saw that piece of junk again.” What I have never heard is a wheelchair user describe their chair like a foreign entity transporting them without their control.

“Carried like objects” are the words of someone who has made no effort to understand wheelchair users or our complex relationships with the technology we rely on. For further proof of this, you need look no further than the terrible AI-rendering of SAAD they approved.

I’m sure some readers will take issue with criticizing engineers and researchers who are trying to help our community. If these problematic examples were few and far between, maybe I’d agree, but the frequency with which they keep popping up suggests the disconnect between our two communities remains substantial. Don’t get me wrong, I want these great minds to stay focused on us, but on valuable solutions, not out-of-touch headline-grabbers.

For now, I’ll stick to my drone-free wheelchair.