Anthropometry of Wheeled Mobility Project: Final Report

2.3.4 Analysis of Door Use Difficulty

The measurement of door use performance was designed as a quasi-experimental study that involved systematically observing and coding WhMD user performance during door use tasks. It therefore required different analysis and comparison approaches.

First, an analysis of the demographic variables for the subset of WhMD users who completed the door use tasks was completed to describe the percentages of men and women, and types of WhMDs used in this sub-group. The mean, median and range of WhMD user age, occupied width, occupied length and maximum power grip were also reported as we thought that these variables might help explain the door use performance among the sub-group.

The level of difficulty experienced for each of the phases of door use was then compared across the three different doors and WhMD types for each of the tasks. Specifically, the percentage of each of the rating scores (minimum effort, moderate effort, maximum effort and impossible) was calculated for each of the three doors and six door use tasks. Those doors and door use tasks having a relatively large percentage of scores exceeding minimum effort were identified as potentially problematic, and a follow-up analysis of these conditions was performed to determine which WhMD user groups had the greatest difficulty with these tasks.