Environmental Intervention Evaluation to Support Motor Planning of Wheelchair Movements: A Pilot Study

Abstract

Environmental interventions provide a promising opportunity to support inclusive mobility in our rapidly changing society and workforce. Concurrently, the trends for aging into mobility disability, working into older age, and health and economic burdens of unpaid caregiving continue to rise. Hence, providing equitable mobility for all is an urgent need. In the context of manual wheelchair control, a novel method investigating the impact of environmental interventions on individual’s internal representation of motor actions is proposed. In addition to measuring objective and subjective performance metrics, we propose that an understanding of how internal representations of tasks are influenced by user perception of the environment has promising potential towards informing effective and inclusive task-environment interactions. The application explored in this pilot study aims to facilitate mobility.