Inequity by inequity: Community driven investigation of wheelchair user discomfort by infrastructure failures
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Date
2022-11-10Author
McCullough, Steven
Eisma, Jessica
Park, June Young
Salazar, Mikila
Rose, Sarah F.
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Show full item recordAbstract
Wheelchair users face a variety of disability-related inequities in
the built environment. The primary challenge is that current legislation for relieving disability inequities focuses on design guidelines and less so in monitoring their discomfort. While there is
literature about monitoring wheelchair users, there is little available data regarding wheelchair user discomfort across the built
environment. Therefore, we create a transformative approach to
measure a wheelchair user’s personal comfort (WheelCom) using
open-source solutions, allowing more citizens to engage in the
inequity challenge. To demonstrate, we lectured our approach to
local high school students to develop WheelCom. Subsequently,
actual wheelchair users measured their personal environment by
installing the developed WheelCom on their wheelchairs. The measurement was conducted around a university campus. Our results
show a clear pattern of unhealthy air quality (PM2.5) right after a
sharp acceleration change (bump on seat). In addition, the spots
flagged for discomfort by wheelchair users line up with more intense levels of acceleration. Further, this indicates that wheelchair
users suffered from not only their uncomfortable seating conditions
but also unhealthy air quality because of infrastructure failures.