An Evaluation of Foot Rowing Type Wheelchair for Elderly People by Using Questionnaire with Experiments

Providing useful and affordable mobility is one of the most important points for ideal aging society. Especially, mobility device for elderly, disabled and handicapped people should be provided. Current type of wheelchair is useful for those who can use their arms and hands. But, if their arms and hands are disabled or difficult to move, current type of wheelchair is not useful. In order to solve the problem, we developed the new type of wheelchair. The feature of the developed prototype wheelchair is foot rowing. We have developed the prototype considering elderly people and finally performed experiments for evaluation. In the experiments, the differences were evaluated between the developed wheelchairs and ordinary type of wheelchair, which is turned by user's hands. The contents of questionnaire are ease of movement, comfortability of riding and getting on and off, each movement including forward, backward, braking, right and left turning, traveling on bump road, slope and slalom. Also, comments about every content and indoor and outdoor locations to use this wheelchair were obtained. From the experimental results, interesting points were found and these points are valuable for the future developing.