WheelUp! Developing an Interactive Electric-power Wheelchair Virtual Training Environment
Max Chen, Yihong Xu, Alexander Sirois, Yichen Li, Robert E. Dempski, Gillian Smith, Yuko Oda, Yunus Doğan Telliel, Erika Lewis, Kelilah L. Wolkowicz · 2023
Standard power wheelchair training is considered inadequate by clinicians and users due to insufficient means to evaluate user performance in varying environments. Virtual environment training offers a promising alternative by providing users with more practical opportunities while reducing the time demands on clinicians. However, there is a need to further explore and optimize game design elements and strategies to ensure engaging and effective training experiences for a diverse range of users. This paper presents our progress of WheelUp!, an open-source electric wheelchair virtual reality (VR) simulator. The simulator offers modularity for clinician-controlled difficulty adjustment, immediate visual and audio feedback, and a visualization tool to aid in clinical assessment and monitoring of progress. This is the first step to building an interactive platform to address the inadequacy of wheelchair training.