Development of product design specifications for paraplegic wheelchair

Abstract

People with disability (PwD) contribute a significant percentage of the world’s population-over 15%. The attention to their special needs has long been ignored and traditional design approaches are still used to design products which PwD are not comfortable with. The front end of design process has not been well addressed in the design for products used by paraplegics, and this results in user apathy or total abandonment of these products. To address this problem, this study develops a framework for preparing Product Design Specification (PDS) through sourcing information from the equipment, the user, and the task or ‘use’ process. Information is sourced from the most common equipment (wheelchair) using the matrix method, segmentation technique of TRIZ (Theory of inventive Problem Solving Methodology) and the hierarchical clustering method. User’s information is sourced through questionnaire, interview and observation techniques. The information collected was mined using the functional analysis techniques of TRIZ inventive principles to develop key elements which were subsequently expanded to build a comprehensive “preliminary PDS (βPDS)”. The βPDS was used as basis for a computer based Auto Retrieval Tool (ART) developed to ease precision information retrieval. Moreover, the PDS ART was validated by members of the UTM robotics team. The results from the validation exercise show the PDS ART as significantly better, simple, easy to use, informative, flexible and precise in terms of amount of PDS generated and time spent. This tool will aid designers in developing comprehensive wheelchair design PDS for different clientele with respect to gender, age, weight and height.