Influence of Tire Pressure to Workload for Manipulating a Wheelchair

Abstract

It is well known that the workload for propelling a manual wheelchair is affected by many factors. Some of them are related to the wheelchair itself, and the others are those that are not related to the wheelchair. From many users' experiences, the tire pressure has been thought as the most effective one in the former factors. In these circumstances, the purpose of this research is to clarify the relation between the tire pressure of the driving wheel and the required driving force in manually propelled wheelchairs. Then, a clinical testing to measure required driving forces in different tire pressures at a manually propelled wheelchair has been carried out by using a standard wheelchair in conformity with the Japanese Industrial Standards (JIS). The result of the testing indicates that the required driving forces increased according to decrease of the tire pressure. This objectively reveals that appropriate tire pressure in manually propelled wheelchairs is the one of important factors to reduce driving force.