Development of power add on drive wheelchair and its evaluation

Recently, due to increasing aging population, there has been increased interest and demand for electric powered wheelchairs. However, generally, they are considerably large or heavy to be transported by a vehicle. In order to improve this problem, a power add-on drive wheelchair(PADW) has been developed by combining the advantages of a manual wheelchair and a powered wheelchair. In particular, a study of in-wheel motor has been an important issue to develop a light weight powered wheelchair since the volume and the weight of the wheelchair can be minimized by containing many mechanical elements such as motor, brake, reducers and etc. inside of a wheel hub. In this study, the design specification of a driving motor for a PADW is determined via modeling, and a light-weight wheelchair is developed by adopting an in-wheel motor that is detachable from the wheelchair and allows conversion between the manual and the powered modes freely. Further, through the various experiments, the performance of the developed PADW was evaluated.