Development of Surface Roughness Standards for Pathways Used by Wheelchair Users: Final Report

Literature Review

The literature review focused on two topics. The first review of the literature focused on the effects of surface roughness on the health and safety of WC riders. The second topic was to explore ways to measure, design, and monitor the quality of pathway surfaces for WC users. Therefore two separate searches were conducted. A literature review was completed using searches on PubMed and Google Scholar in October of 2010, and more recently in November of 2011 to identify any new articles. For the search on WC vibrations, both databases were searched for titles that had the word wheelchair and any of the following: vibration, shock, surface, roughness, firmness, sidewalk, or pathway. The second search was conducted by searching titles for the word roughness and any of the following: road, roadway, measurement, profile, or profiling. This search was only conducted on Google Scholar and was limited to the fields of engineering, computer science, and mathematics. We performed a systematic review of the relevant literature. Relevance was determined first by reviewing abstracts, and then reviewing entire articles. First, abstracts of all of the papers identified through the keyword searches were compiled into a single document, and each was reviewed. If the abstract suggested the manuscript was relevant to the topic, the entire manuscript was then reviewed. Only manuscripts that were deemed irrelevant were then discarded, and the remaining manuscripts were included in this review.