Stair-Climbing Wheelchair based on Upper Body Biomechanics (the third report)

Abstract

This study proposes a novel stair-climbing wheelchair using lever propulsion control by human upper body. The developed wheelchair is designed based on a regular manual wheelchair, which has manual wheels with casters for planar locomotion. It also has a rotary-legs mechanism operated by a user through a lever. In addition, the wheelchair has a posture transition mechanism to shift a whole center of mass between desired positions for planar locomotion and stair-climbing. In this paper, we investigate muscle loads of a user by different lever propelled directions during stair-climbing. Furthermore, we present stair-climbing experiments with a person with spinal cord injury to verify the effectiveness of the proposed stair-climbing methodology.