China
Africa
Explore chapters and articles related to this topic
Understanding the end user
Published in Alex Mihailidis, Roger Smith, Rehabilitation Engineering, 2023
Jennifer Boger, Tony Gentry, Suzanne Martin, Johnny Kelley
As you may know, vendors can modify minivans with kits that include lowered floors, automated ramps, and wheelchair lockdown features that allow a motorized wheelchair to take the place of a driver's seat. The electronics package installed in most adapted vans allows a key fob to remotely operate the wheelchair ramp. But once at the driver's console, there were individualized challenges to surmount. For instance, because of limited mobility, I had to drive with one hand while operating a hand brake and accelerator with my other hand, so we needed to modify the steering wheel for one-handed operation. We installed a steering post that eliminates the need to grab and release the wheel while turning. That helped, but I wanted to further customize the post, replacing its foam padding with a spray-on truck bed liner that made it easier to let go when I needed to shift gears. Hours were spent sanding and polishing the adapted post to perfectly fit my needs. The liner material sparkles, so now the post looks cool, too! By far, that has to be my favorite piece of AT in my van.
New directions in STEM education
Published in Yuli Rahmawati, Peter Charles Taylor, Empowering Science and Mathematics for Global Competitiveness, 2019
For both programs there was a variety of arrangements for interdisciplinary STEM work. These included: 1) inter-disciplinary project work involving two or three STEM subjects with teachers planning together, round topics such as space exploration (science of rocketry, mathematics of mars calendar or inter-planetary communication), often involving major design work such as an inner urban sustainable house, go-cart construction (science of motion, engineering design, mathematics of wheel size) or a school garden; 2) cross disciplinary project work within a single subject, for instance the design of a wheelchair ramp involving investigating motion and slope, structural design within a mathematics unit focused on measurement, geometry and trigonometry; 3) special STEM project activities such as competitions, industry visits; 4) a separate integrated STEM unit with teachers from different subjects consulted; and 5) a focus on incorporating progression in digital technology work across the curriculum.
Navigating without vision: spontaneous use of terrain slant in outdoor place learning
Published in Spatial Cognition & Computation, 2021
Daniele Nardi, Katelyn J. Singer, Krista M. Price, Samantha E. Carpenter, Joseph A. Bryant, Mackenzie A. Hatheway, Jada N. Johnson, Annika K. Pairitz, Keldyn L. Young, Nora S. Newcombe
Participants were able to encode the target location and replace the target with significantly smaller errors in the slanted site than the flat site, suggesting that the terrain slope aided place learning. Furthermore, performance in the flat terrain site did not deviate significantly from what would be expected if participants encoded only the distance of the target from the starting location, but not its direction. This indicates that on the flat terrain participants could not use uncontrolled cues (such as the sound of people walking, car traffic, the sensation of wind, sun, etc.) to solve the task. Conversely, in the slanted site, the performance was significantly better than what would be expected if guessing the direction of the target. This supports the fact that, because of the slant, participants encoded the direction of the target and restricted their responses around this. It should be noted that the slanted site presented only a 4° slope (1:14 or 7% grade); to give a term of comparison, the maximum slope of wheelchair ramps according to current ADA standards (Americans with Disability Act of 1990) is 4.8° (1:12 or 8% grade). Overall, these findings suggest that the presence of even a gentle hill provides people with a useful directional cue (Jacobs & Schenk, 2003) that can guide behavior.