The research has been funded by Microsoft and Nokia. When looking at the unit, you can see it it powered by a mobile device, a UMPC or perhaps a MID, I am guessing a MID due to the contributions from Nokia here. Video at the source below to see the wheelchair in action. Speech recognition and voice commands are becoming more popular today as new ways in, which you can react and interface with computers. I just gave a talk last week to a Microsoft Users senior group who wanted to learn how to use speech recognition in Vista and found they were also very much interested in using the Windows Narrator to read text back, something that has been in Windows for quite a while now, but many do not even know it has existed on 
the operating system since Windows 98.
Some really nice work going on at MIT and great for the residents of the nursing home in Dorchester who are getting to use the wheelchairs while development takes place. BD
(PhysOrg.com) -- MIT researchers are developing a new kind of autonomous wheelchair that can learn all about the locations in a given building, and then take its occupant to a given place in response to a verbal command.
Just by saying "take me to the cafeteria" or "go to my room," the wheelchair user would be able to avoid the need for controlling every twist and turn of the route and could simply sit back and relax as the chair moves from one place to another based on a map stored in its memory.
Roy and Teller have been exploring the use of WiFi signals, as well as wide-field cameras and laser rangefinders, coupled to computer systems that can construct and localize within an internal map of the environment as they move around.
After months of preliminary tests on campus, they have begun trials in a real nursing home environment with real patients, at the Boston Home in Dorchester, a facility where all of the nearly 100 patients have partial or substantial loss of muscle control and use wheelchairs.
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