Abstract
On ships, passengers using wheelchairs are exposed to danger such as uncontrollable running due to acceleration resulted from ship motion. It is, therefore, necessary to clarify the clarify the relation between wheelchair running and acceleration to design passageways in passenger ships, for the purpose of improvement of safety and usability of ships for wheelchair users. Such relation, however, has not been clarified enough. The purpose of this research is to develop numerical model for describing wheelchair running under anticipated acceleration conditions to enable the evaluation of width of passageways necessary for preventing collision of wheel chair to a wall or other obstacles. The authors already developed a numerical model for wheelchair running under various acceleration conditions. To evaluate the width of passageways, in addition to the above-mentioned model, operation model, which describes action of wheelchair users, should be developed. In this paper, we propose such models.
