Purpose and Objectives: The interviews, focus groups and observational trials in Project I and various surveys in Project II can provide important subjective information about how wheelchairs are used. These data are vital to understanding user perceptions, but data that is much more objective and ecologically representative of actual use can be collected by recording aspects of the wheelchair’s behavior over longer periods of time (for example, recording over days or weeks how far and how fast the wheelchair travels, how long the user is sitting in the wheelchair, the frequency of major jolts, etc). A data logger is a collection of sensors and a storage system attached to a wheelchair designed to perform these recordings. There are three specific objectives for this project:
Objective 1: To unify existing Canadian data logger projects to ensure that comparable data is collected by all data logging platforms, to share best practices for working with the data loggers, and to identify avenues for further development of data loggers.
Objective 2: To integrate data logging features into the smart wheelchair prototypes.
Objective 3: To investigate what data analyses might be performed onboard the wheelchair and how they could inform the operation of the smart wheelchair.
Published
Routhier F, Lettre J, Miller WC, Borisoff JF, Keetch K, Mitchell IM, the CanWheel Research Team. Data logger technologies for manual wheelchairs: A scoping review. Assistive Technology 2016, DOI: 10.1080/10400435.2016.1242516
Routhier F, Lettre J, Miller WC, Borisoff JF, Keetch K, Mitchell IM, the CanWheel Research Team. Clinicians’ and researchers’ perspectives on manual wheelchair data loggers. Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation 2017, DOI: 10.1016/j.apmr.2017.01.013
Routhier F, Lettre J, Miller WC, Borisoff JF, Keetch K, Mitchell IM, the CanWheel Research Team. Data logger technologies for powered wheelchairs: A scoping review. Assistive Technology 2017, DOI: 10.1080/10400435.2017.1340913
International Conferences
Routhier F, Lettre J, Mitchell IM, Borisoff J, Miller WC. A scoping review of data logger technologies used with manual wheelchairs. Submitted to the Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Technology Society of North America (RESNA) Conference. 2015 June 10-14; Denver, Colorado.
Routhier F, Keetch K, Lettre J, Mitchell IM, Borisoff J, and Miller WC. Manual Wheelchair Data Logging: Outcomes, Challenges and Barriers. Open paper presented at the 32nd International Seating Symposium. Vancouver, B.C., 2016 March 1-4.