Proceedings of the ACM Int'l Conference on Body Area Networks (BodyNets), Tempe, AZ, March 2008.
The number and percentage of people in need of a wheelchair are increasing every year. In the U.S. alone, about 2.2 million people are using wheelchairs for their daily mobility. Furthermore, it is predicted that the number will increase by 22 percent a year over the next ten years to come. The market for power wheelchairs has shown tremendous growth in recent years, experiencing annual growth rates in excess of 55%. Unfortunately, wheelchair users are much more limited in access to conventional IT resources such as home computers and Internet, compared with their non-disabled counterparts. Moreover, no computer systems specifically designed and optimized for wheelchair users exist today that match the powerful desktop PC systems found in the market. The lack of such computer systems may lead to not only severely deteriorated quality of life for the wheelchair users, but also much reduced opportunities for them to be successful in various occupations. In the long run, the situation can keep people out of the workforce, and result in a less competitive workforce in this nation. In this proposed research, we envision a wheelchair-worn computing system that is as effectively usable by wheelchair users as other conventional high-performance PC systems are usable for general users. For a person who requires a wheelchair for mobility, the wheelchair becomes an extension of the person's body. We call the computer system we envision Ubiquitous Computing and Health-monitoring System for Wheelchair Users (u-CHS). As a preliminary study for the development of the u-CHS, we surveyed the needs and usages of the computing and health-monitoring system for wheelchair users in order to fully identify and understand the design requirements for the u-CHS. We got enthusiastic 100 responses from wheelchair users via the voluntary online survey in two months. And we developed some key design concepts about the input/output, CPU, and weight scale modules based on the survey results. We will proceed with the study to build a prototype U-CHS and to measure the effectiveness of the u-CHS using the prototype design. We hypothesize that the use of the u-CHS will lead to improvement in both the metrics.