3rd Hand: A Device to Support Elderly and Disabled Person Ummay Habiba 1 , Shiuly Barua 1 , Faisal Ahmed 2 , Golap Kanti Dey 1 , Kazi Tanvir Ahmmed* 1 1 Department of Applied Physics, Electronics and Communication Engineering, University of Chittagong 2 Department of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Chittagong Bangladesh habiba.ap16@gmail.com, baruashiuly@gmail.com, faisal.cse91@gmail.com, d.k.golap@gmail.com, tanvir@cu.ac.bd Abstract— This paper represents a system “3 rd HAND”, that can serve a disable person or elder person to perform some of their regular tasks without any helping hand. This system helps a person to switch the regular home loads (light, fan etc.) using his voice commands and his location can be tracked when he travels outside alone with the system. In self-regulated system we used an EASY_VR voice recognition module. The recognized control commands are sent to an ARDUINO for proper program controlling and then to a Bluetooth module. After that, the commands are routed to the target device over Bluetooth network and finally carried out by the control circuit. In GPS tracking system, we used the GPS and SMS services of an android mobile phone. When a client sends a request SMS to the system to get its location, the GPS receiver of the phone calculates the location coordinates and converts it to location name using GEOCODING API. Finally the location name is sent to the client automatically. Generally it is not comfortable and secured for a disabled or elder person to switch their home loads and to travel alone. So the system “3 rd hand” provides them a safety switching system and supports them to travel independently in safe. Keywords- self-regulated, voice recognition, wireless communication, GPS, GSM, location tracking etc. I. INTRODUCTION With the increasing of average age of world population as a result of advancement of medical science, the elderly population is increasing rapidly worldwide. And a statistics shows that more than 500 million people in the world are disabled as a consequence of physical, sensory, or mental impairment. It is a responsibility for the people all around the world to support this large number of population [1]. Life is very difficult for the people mentioned because they are completely dependent on others for their regular movement task. They need a constant care giver [2]. Though we can’t remove the sufferings of their daily life, we can try to make their life little easier with the help of modern technologies. Elder persons and persons with special needs are unable or face difficulties to operate their regular home loads like light, fan, AC etc. [3]. And they need a continuous attender when they travel outside. So we came up with a project that will help those persons to perform some of their daily works independently and safely. The objective of our project is to provide those persons with a system that can operate their home loads automatically with their voice commands only [4] and can detect their current location when they travel outside alone and send their location name via SMS to clients who want to monitor their current location. The elder and disable persons face difficulties with a remote control device which controls the home appliances remotely by button press feature [5]. So we have designed and implemented this system with a feature of self-regulation controlled by voice commands instead of any button press system. In this self-regulation system, we used Easy-VR shield for voice recognition process instead of smart phones which can accept voice commands. This is because if we use smart phones for controlling home load with voice commands, we must have continuous Wi-Fi connection. But this Wi-Fi is not much available in many 3 rd world countries like Bangladesh. Voice controlled self-regulated system is based on speech recognition technology. This technology allows a CPU to recognize and analyze a set of pre-programmed voice commands produced by a person using a microphone [6]. In this voice controlled home automation system, the major challenge is to overcome the problems with distant voice command and speech recognition in the noisy environment [7]. Another feature of our project is GPS tracking. By using this feature, anyone can monitor the position of an elder or disable person when he travels outside alone. This system is based on GPS and GSM technology [8, 9]. We used android phone as target device [10]. In this system a client who is interested to monitor the position of the person mentioned carrying GPS system, sends a request message to the system. After receiving request message, the GPS system calculates the position of that person by using signals from the satellites [11, 12]. Then the system automatically sends a message containing the location name of that person to the client via GSM network. II. DESIGN OVERVIEW The system “3 rd hand” is an integrated system to facilitate the older and disable persons with a self-regulated system that can be fully operated by voice commands and with a GPS tracking system that can detect the location of the persons mentioned when they travel alone. In self-regulated system, there are two major parts. One is transmitter part and another is receiver part. In this section of home automation system, we used two ARDUINO mega 2560, one of which is used in transmitter part and another is used in receiver part. Here two HC-05 Bluetooth modules are used for setting up the wireless communication between the transmitter part and the receiver Proceedings of International Conference on Electrical Information and Communication Technology (EICT 2015) 978-1-4673-9257-0/15/$31.00 ©2015 IEEE 1