Elevator Voice Control for Visually Impaired Users
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Solution Overview
Problem
Visually impaired individuals using elevators to register destination floors by voice often feel uneasy and risk exiting at incorrect floors due to lack of notification about intermediate stops before reaching their destination.
Innovation Solution
An elevator control device and method that includes a voice recognition unit to identify the destination floor and an elevator control unit to generate stop floor information, which is then used to provide voice announcements about the intermediate stops or the number of stops before reaching the destination, ensuring the user is informed of the car's progress.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Ease of operation
If voice recognition is implemented for destination floor registration, then ease of operation is improved, but information notification completeness deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The notification system is segmented into multiple types: intermediate stop notifications (announcing each stop floor before destination) and final destination notifications. This segmentation ensures that visually impaired users receive discrete, manageable information chunks about each stop rather than a single overwhelming announcement, maintaining ease of voice operation while improving information completeness.
Solution Approach 2:
The system implements feedback by notifying users of intermediate stops between their current floor and destination floor. This feedback loop provides continuous information about progress toward the destination, preventing information loss that would otherwise occur with voice-only registration systems.
2Reliability
If voice announcement of intermediate stops is added, then reliability is improved, but device complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The notification device is designed to perform multiple functions: it announces intermediate stop floors, announces the final destination floor, and can adapt its notification pattern based on the number of intermediate stops. This multi-functionality improves reliability by ensuring accurate floor identification while avoiding the need for separate dedicated devices for each notification type, thus limiting the increase in device complexity.
Solution Approach 2:
The notification system dynamically adjusts its behavior based on the number of intermediate stops. When there are fewer intermediate stops, it announces each floor sequentially; when there are more intermediate stops, it provides summarized information. This dynamic adaptation improves reliability by providing appropriate information density while keeping the control system manageable through rule-based logic rather than complex algorithms.
Data Source
AI summary
An elevator control device recognizes a destination floor of a user from a voice of the user input to a voice input device, registers a voice car call corresponding to the recognized destination floor, generates stop floor information including a stop floor at which a car stops before the car arrives at the destination floor after the registration of the voice car call, and performs, as a voice announcement that follows the generated stop floor information, any one of a first announcement for notifying of the stop floor in order of floors at which the car stops and a second announcement for notifying of how many floors the car stops at before arriving at the destination floor.