Journal of Rehabil itation Research & Development How many people would benefit from a smart wheelchair?

Abstract—Independent mobility is important, but some wheel-chair users find operating existing manual or powered wheel-chairs difficult or impossible. Challenges to safe, independent wheelchair use can result from various overlapping physical, perceptual, or cognitive symptoms of diagnoses such as spinal cord injury, cerebrovascular accident, multiple sclerosis, amyo-trophic lateral sclerosis, and cerebral palsy. Persons with differ-ent symptom combinations can benefit from different types of assistance from a smart wheelchair and different wheelchair form factors. The sizes of these user populations have been esti-mated based on published estimates of the number of individu-als with each of several diseases who (1) also need a wheeled mobility device and (2) have specific symptoms that could interfere with mobility device use. Key words: assistive technology, cognitive impairment, human-machine systems, physical impairment, rehabilitation, robotics, smart wheelchairs, wheelchairs, wheeled mobility, veterans, visual impairment