Design of an appropriate manual cum powered wheelchair

Abstract

Wheelchair usage in India is increasing rapidly due to ageing population, road accidents and injuries etc. In case of nuclear families, the elder people those who are unable to do their regular activities without assistance, are left alone at their home on most occasions. Manual propelling is difficult for aged people, so to avoid it they choose the motorized wheelchair, which are quite costly and unaffordable for many. It is difficult for the illiterate people to understand and maintain the powered wheelchair available in the market To overcome the above difficulties, this paper presents a novel method to drive the manual wheelchair with electric power using belt drive system. The paper does performance analysis of mechanical power transfer method employing belt driven system. The Direct current (DC) motor is fixed to each rear wheel of the wheelchair. The belt system is used to establish the contact between the rear wheel of the manual wheel chair and DC motor for transferring mechanical power from motor to wheelchair. The calculated results depict the robustness of the manual cum Electric-powered wheelchair. Based on these results, it is ensured that the proposed wheelchair will increase the quality of the life of elderly people and those with disabilities requiring wheelchair use.