A preliminary investigation of handrim kinetics in various environmental situations crossed in manual wheelchair

Abstract

During manual wheelchair (MWC) locomotion, the user's upper limbs are subject to significant levels of stress and fatigue because the upper body is permanently engaged to propel the MWC and in all daily activities (van der Woude et al., 2001). This stress can lead to pain and wounds in the upper limbs which in turn may lead to difficulties in autonomy and social integration for MWC users. Suggesting adequate and accessible paths for urban locomotion to MWC users could be a way to reduce the loads sustained by the upper limbs for this population. Tools for suggesting accessible places have already been forwarded in several smartphone applications, but no solution is currently able to provide the best accessible path to move from one place to another. This primarily requires the definition of a quantitative criterion that can be linked to the user’ individual physical capacities In the literature, the physical difficulty of a situation is generally described using either the propelling torque (i.e. the torque acting at the wheel hub and that ensure the wheel rotation) or through the total force applied by the user on the handrim (Koontz et al., 2005; Richter et al., 2007). However, it is unknown if the ranking of the situation difficulty based on these two criteria are equivalent. Hence, the aim of this preliminary study was to evaluate the ranking of various environmental situations according to the two previous criteria: propelling torque and the handrim total force.