Assessment of driving skills using virtual reality: Comparative survey on experts and unskilled users of electric wheelchairs

This survey addresses the issue of assessment of a person driving skills to operate a powered wheelchair. Usually, the acquisition of a new wheelchair implies several evaluations tests to fit the wheelchair's configuration to the specificities of the user's disabilities. Usually, such tests are made in the actual world and based mainly on qualitative observations. Virtual Reality has been applied to transpose the actual tests into a Virtual World, and define methods completed with quantitative criteria to put into evidence the ability that a person has to drive an electric wheelchair. To do this we propose a comparative survey that implies tests made in a virtual world to investigate the differences between experienced users with disabilities, and unskilled (able-bodied) subjects. The results of the tests allowed to define mainly two quantitative criteria related to the joystick position xj (along its X axis). One is based on the amplitude of the xj signal and the other on the Power Spectral Density of xj. The association of the proposed criteria appeared to be efficient to identify the skilled and unskilled subjects.