WHL

About the Discipline

Overcoming uneven terrain and stairs with a wheelchair

People who use a powered wheelchair for personal mobility are often confronted with challenges in their daily lives. Individual steps, flights of stairs, or uneven terrain can pose big obstacles. Depending on a wheelchair user’s function of the trunk and arms, it can also be very difficult to open and close a door or to pick up an object from the ground. Users must often rely on help from a third party to overcome such situations. Recently, technologies such as stair-climbing mechanisms have been developed to provide support in some of the situations mentioned above. However, these technologies are often developed for specific tasks only and their function cannot be applied to other situations. The addition of technologies such as stair-climbing mechanisms to powered wheelchairs has the promising potential to improve the personal mobility of people with a severe walking disability in daily life.

As a rule, the competition tasks will include a greater level of uncertainty about the exact structure or exact arrangement of the various objects, e.g., variable patterns of stones and unevenness in rough terrain, or stairs of varying step height and/or angles. Manipulating objects that are related to personal mobility, such as opening and closing a door, are likewise included in the wheelchair race. Seat height adjustment will be advantageous in some tasks.