Independent Wheelchair Transfers in the Built Environment: How Transfer Setup Impacts Performance Phase 2: Final Report

Protocol C Heights Obtained

Like the two previous protocols the HERL participants transferred lower on average compared to the NDVWSC participants. For the maximum height transfers HERL's percentile heights were slightly higher for the 25th and 75th percentiles than the NDVWSC heights. These results can be seen in tables E8 and E9 respectively.

Table E8. Percentiles for the Lowest Attainable Transfer Heights Protocol C
Data shown in inches

Table E9. Percentiles for the Highest Attainable Transfer Heights Protocol C
Data shown in inches

We compared the two groups for transfer heights to/from the wheelchair to a level platform with and without grab bars and also evaluated their maximum and minimum transfers heights to the platform for each grab bar condition.  As can be seen from the results in Table E10, the HERL and NDVWSC study participants attained similar transfer heights for all parts of the protocol.   An independent t-test comparison of these results (p-values shown in Table 10) showed no statistically significant differences between the two groups for transfer performance.  This result supports that the veterans who participate in these events are not very different from the subjects that we recruit at HERL from the general community. 

Table E10:  Comparison of transfer performance in Phase 2 of the multi-year study on transfers between wheelchair users tested at HERL and veterans tested at the NDVWC heights attained between both subject populations. Height data are shown in inches. No significant difference was found between the subjects.