Mobility is essential for individuals with physical disabilities, and wheelchairs significantly enhance their quality of life. Recent advancements focus on developing sophisticated control systems for effective and efficient interaction. This study evaluates the usability and performance of three wheelchair control modes manual, automatic, and voice controlled using a virtual reality (VR) simulation tool. VR provides a controlled and repeatable environment to assess navigation performance and motion sickness across three scenarios: supermarket, museum, and city. Twenty participants completed nine tests each, resulting in 180 trials. Findings revealed significant differences in navigation efficiency, distance, and collision rates across control modes and scenarios. Automatic control consistently achieved faster navigation times and fewer collisions, particularly in the supermarket. Manual control offered precision but required greater user effort. Voice control, while intuitive, resulted in longer distances traveled and higher collision rates in complex scenarios like the city. Motion sickness levels varied across scenarios, with higher discomfort reported in the city during voice and automatic control. Participant feedback, gathered via a Likert scale questionnaire, highlighted the potential of VR simulation for evaluating user comfort and performance. This research underscores the advantages of VR-based testing for rapid prototyping and user-centered design, offering valuable insights into improving wheelchair control systems. Future work will explore adaptive algorithms to enhance usability and accessibility in real world applications.

Mobility is a fundamental necessity for individuals with physical disabilities, and wheelchairs play a vital role in improving their quality of life. In recent decades, there has been a growing interest in designing and developing more advanced wheelchairs, particularly regarding control systems that enable users to interact effectively and efficiently with their chairs. Implementing different control systems in wheelchairs has been the subject of research and development to enhance user experience and overcome limitations associated with conventional controls. Virtual reality (VR) is a valuable tool for testing new technologies, ensuring user safety, and reducing development time. This article aims to present a comparative evaluation of various controls implemented in a simulated wheelchair, analyzing their effectiveness and ease of use through navigation in three different daily-life scenarios. Twenty participants(11 males and 9 females) received VR operation and controls training. Each participant completed three tests per control in each scenario. The results showed that participants performed better while navigating with autonomous and manual controls than with voice controls. However, participants experienced associated motion sickness during the interaction. Contrary to voice control, despite causing less motion sickness, the participants' performance shows that a high voice command recognition rate and reliability are mandatory to be a viable option. Our setup represents a useful experimental setup for future research and improvements in developing wheelchair control systems in virtual environments to cater to the individual needs and abilities of end-users in reality.