Development of wheelchair simulator for training of wheelie motion

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to develop a VR simulator that can safely train wheelie, which is a stepping technique for manual wheelchair users. The equation of motion of the wheelchair was shown, and the actual wheelchair motion was compared with the simulation results. A wheelchair simulator that moves using this equation of motion was constructed. The effectiveness of the simulator in wheelie training was evaluated by experiments. In the experiment, 20 subjects were divided into two groups of 10 subjects, and one group trained using a wheelchair simulator and did not practice the other group. After that, Subjects tried wheelie in a real wheelchair and we calculated the success rates. As a result, the average success rate of the group using the wheelchair simulator increased by about 48 points compared to the unused group. From the results, it was shown that the simulator developed in this study is effective for learning the wheelie motion.

Keywords

• virtual reality
• simulator
• wheelchair
• wheelie motion
• training