駆動能力評価用車いすの開発

概要

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Population of wheelchair users is increasing in Japan due to the rapidly aging society. Commercial wheelchairs had been either manual wheelchairs or powered wheelchairs when power assisted wheelchairs were put on the market a couple of years ago. Fitting has been done principally by dimensional information, but to choose a proper wheelchair among diversified wheelchairs, quantitative evaluation of propelling force is recommended. It will also help finding the dimension such as placement of rear-wheel axis. Wheelchairs for the evaluation have been developed, but they are for laboratory use only. In this study a prototype of anunwired portable wheelchair was developed for propelling force evaluation. Propelling force is detected in the form of torque with magnetostrictive sensor. Running speed and gradient of the road are also recorded on a memory card for the analysis on a personal computer. Besides fitting, the wheelchair can be used for rehabilitation training process and also wheelchair sports training. This paper describes mechanism, circuitry, data processing and measurement results of the youth and the elderly.