Comfort Management Through a Universal Wheelchair Dashboard

Abstract

Wheelchair users can accumulate many hours on their chairs every day, using them for transport, work and leisure activities. Despite being necessary for leading a typical daily life, long, uninterrupted use can become uncomfortable and result in various health implications. Many commercial solutions target individual problems, such as cushion comfort, temperature regulation and posture control. However, they all work independently and there is a lack of solutions that provide holistic management methods for the additional mental load a wheelchair user must manage daily. We present a wheelchair dashboard designed for discomfort management. Features include displaying data like temperature from in-seat sensors, customised reminders for users to shift their weight or transfer out of the wheelchair to avoid pressure related health complications and control of add-on wheelchair products such as a temperature regulation prototype we are develo** and demonstrating alongside this dashboard. While the aim is for this dashboard to be an end user tool, because of the lack of research work in wheelchair comfort, this dashboard can be a powerful research tool, from which studies can be designed and carried on, such as running prompt queries and supplementing questionnaire responses with sensor data.