# Wireless Home Assistive System for Severely Disabled People
## 1 Introduction  
The lives of people with severe disabilities such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), motor neuron diseases (MND), cerebral palsy (CP), spinal cord injury (SCI), and stroke with intubation can be effectively improved to some extent with the help of assistive communication systems [1]. When some of the original human functions such as the functions of movement and language are disabled, it would result in very serious problems and inconvenience in the disabled's daily life. According to the world report on disability produced by World Health Organization [2], the proportion of the world's population over 60 years old will increase from 11% to 22%, and 15% of the world's population by 2050 are estimated to be living with a disability. Once the patients lose their capabilities of movement and language, they can not communicate with the world smoothly. The disabled person can not express his/her own opinion conveniently, and then the caregiver can not understand the needs of the disabled person. Therefore, the arguments and mistakes are easily generated between the disabled and the caregiver and result in the disabled's bad mood. The bad relationship between the disabled and the caregiver during long-duration will let the bad things happen which is hard to regret. Hence, it's veryimportant to develop an assistive communication system for improving the communication capability of the disabled person. \"Communication\" is a process of exchanging opinions, transmitting messages, and establishing a relationship. Effective communication could be done through the good medium or tool of communication. The objects of communication not only include humans but also machines. In general, the medium of communication could be language, text, movement, expression and the possible interactive information. A lot of severe disabilities, such as ALS, MNDs, CP, SCI, and stroke, cause people to lose their abilities of speech and movement forever; therefore, they can not communicate with people directly. Of course, they can not control their own daily life by themselves as they wish, either. Gradually, the daily life of the disabled becomes colorless and meaningless. The severely disabled can mean quadriplegia--that the people with serious diseases or handicaps such as movement and speech disabilities lie in bed year round and can do nothing but very limited functions such as blinking the eyes, twisting cheeks, twitching the finger, etc. What they can do every day is to watch the ceiling and ruminate. The severely disabled neither can move by themselves nor communicate with the others. According to the limits of severe disabled, it is very difficult for the severely disabled to communicate with people or machines. However, the sensory nerves and the autonomic nervous system are unaffected, the severely disabled might maintain the capabilities of hearing, sight, touch, smell, taste, thinking, and cognition. In short, to solve the communication problem is the most urgent issue, and it would make the severely disabled live more meaningfully and happily. In December 2014, an assistive context-aware toolkit (ACAT) platform was developed by the Intel research team and the famous astrophysicist named [PERSON], who is a patient with ALS. The researchers in the world can free access the related information of ACAT [3] to implement more effective assistive communication systems because Intel has announced the source codes of the program and the related software on the website. Currently, the important functions of Intel ACAT include keyboard simulation, word prediction, speech synthesis, etc. It can help the severely disabled with movement and speech problems control the computer to communicate with the outside world, including editing, managing documents, navigating the web, writing, and accessing emails. Nevertheless, the body conditions of each disabled people are not the same; thus, ACAT might be not always suitable for all the people with ALS or other severe disabilities.