The Safety Assessment of Wheelchair Occupants in Road Passenger Vehicles with the Frontal Crash: a Computer Simulation

With increasing need of transportation services for people with disabilities and the aged, wheelchairs are used as their assistive devices to participate in daily and recreational activities and as seats of motor vehicle. However, as wheelchairs are primarily designed for mobility assistive devices, not for vehicle seats, wheelchair users may experience serious injury when they meet car crashes. To date, neither engineering guidance for a wheelchair mounting system on the vehicle floor nor safety assessment analysis by a car crash has been studied for the domestic users. In this paper, in accordance with the ANSI/RESNA WC-19, a fixed vehicle mounted wheelchair occupant restraint system (FWORS), wheelchair integrated restraint system (WIRS), and wheelchair integrated x-bend restraint system (WIXRS) subjected to frontal impact (20 g, 48 km/h) were analyzed using computer simulations for domestic users. We present surrogate wheelchair occupant safety by head injury criteria (HIC), motion criteria (MC), and combined injury criteria (CIC).