A simple approach to implementing an environmental control unit for the disabled

Environmental control units play a role in enabling disabled people to carry out routine and repetitive tasks (e.g. watching TV, making a phone call, etc.) in their home environments. Unfortunately, most commercially available environmental control units are either too expensive or they require the disabled persons' home environments to be remodelled. In this paper we report the development of a low-cost environmental control unit which enables disabled people to control mostly existing consumer electronics with an infrared remote control functionality. Finally, we use a simple scenario to evaluate the performance of the proposed environmental control unit.