This report presents the development of joystick drive system for disabled persons. The developed device allows a disabled person to drive a car by joystick operation with small force and short stroke to rotate the steering wheel and to activate the gas pedal and the brake pedal respectively. The concept of a joystick car is to enable a severely disabled person to take independent actions with a car driven by oneself with no human assistance. However, in order to provide a joystick car, safety, reliability and driving-stability are strongly required. To satisfy these requirements, a drive mechanism, a control CPU board and a control software program were originally designed and developed. For safe and comfortable driving using a joystick, a unique control algorithm including a steering restriction function and a variable sensitivity function were developed and implemented as well. An outline of each technical item is described in this report.

The authors developed a seat cover to be mounted on the back support of a wheelchair to decrease the shear force applied to the buttocks while reclining. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of the seat cover. The participants included 11 elderly wheelchair users in a hospital. A force plate was used to measure the shear force. The experimental conditions were two : the seat cover and control condition. The result of this study showed that the shear force under the seat cover condition was significantly lower than the control condition during a fully reclined back support position returning to upright position (p<0.01). This result suggested that the seat cover could decrease the shear force applied to the buttocks while reclining the back support.

Our institute operates a brace clinic weekly, where we accept seventy children on average, in collaboration with over twenty brace providers dealing in prostheses, orthoses, seating systems and wheelchairs. In spite of its large number of clients, our brace clinic had been operated without a reservation system until 2015. This “first-in-first-served” operation had been causing a large number of problems. In order to solve the problems, we developed a computer-based administration system for reservation and prescription registry in 2015. With the aid of this system, we were able to accept more children compared with the “first-in-first-served” operation.

One of the primary goals of rehabilitation for lower-limb amputees is getting used to using a properly fitting prosthesis functionally. However, patients with trans-femoral amputations are much less likely to be successfully fitted than those with trans-tibial amputations. In this study, we conducted a survey to investigate the circumstances of prosthetic usage for trans-femoral amputees to reveal the factors necessary to frequent usage. Questionnaires were given to 89 trans-femoral amputees who received rehabilitation services at our facility between 2001 and 2011. As the result, 52 amputees (73.6%) answered the questionnaire. Prosthetic usage was reported among 53.2% amputees during indoor activities, 91.5% during outdoor activities, and 66.0% for 8 hours per day or longer. The necessity of a wheelchair for indoor locomotion without a prosthesis was newly identified as a factor associated with prosthetic usage in addition to the factors previously reported : age, employment status, stump pain, one-leg balance, and prosthetic walking ability. In the screening of physical functions necessary for prosthetic usage, this can be easily evaluated and considered to be a clinically effective index.