# Independence in the Home: A Wearable Interface for a Person with Quadriplegia to Teleoperate a Mobile Manipulator

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.15071 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15071/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 22 Dec 2023.

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [VoicePilot: Harnessing LLMs as Speech Interfaces for Physically Assistive Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04066/) (2024)
- [EMGBench: Benchmarking Out-of-Distribution Generalization and Adaptation for Electromyography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23625/) (2024)
- [FEAST: A Flexible Mealtime-Assistance System Towards In-the-Wild Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14968/) (2025)
- [EgoCHARM: Resource-Efficient Hierarchical Activity Recognition using an Egocentric IMU Sensor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17735/) (2025)
- [Towards an LLM-Based Speech Interface for Robot-Assisted Feeding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20624/) (2024)
- [LAMS: LLM-Driven Automatic Mode Switching for Assistive Teleoperation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.08558/) (2025)
- [Casper: Inferring Diverse Intents for Assistive Teleoperation with Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14727/) (2025)
- [SAPS: Shared Autonomy for Policy Steering by Blending Teleoperation with a Pretrained VLA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15568/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Teleoperation of mobile manipulators within a home environment can significantly enhance the independence of individuals with severe motor impairments, allowing them to regain the ability to perform self-care and household tasks. There is a critical need for novel teleoperation interfaces to offer effective alternatives for individuals with impairments who may encounter challenges in using existing interfaces due to physical limitations. In this work, we iterate on one such interface, HAT (Head-Worn Assistive Teleoperation), an inertial-based wearable integrated into any head-worn garment. We evaluate HAT through a 7-day in-home study with Henry Evans, a non-speaking individual with quadriplegia who has participated extensively in assistive robotics studies. We additionally evaluate HAT with a proposed shared control method for mobile manipulators termed Driver Assistance and demonstrate how the interface generalizes to other physical devices and contexts. Our results show that HAT is a strong teleoperation interface across key metrics including efficiency, errors, learning curve, and workload. Code and videos are located on our project website.