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Human Engineering Research Laboratory Application Development Internship

May 2021 - Jul. 2021

  • Designed and developed a system for evaluating driving ability with powered wheelchairs in a clinical environment

  • Conducted ethnographic research in clinical environments to identify pain points and use cases

  • Built and deployed a full stack web application and API for collecting and storing data using Ruby on Rails, Heroku, PostgreSQL, and Materialize

  • Wrote a series of Python scripts to implement data collection and processing with a Raspberry Pi and Adafruit Sensor using Pandas, NumPy, and SciPy

  • Wrote a custom local web server in Python using CherryPy and Ngrok

HERL: Projects

About My Project

Currently, clinicians evaluate the driving ability of powered wheelchair users with subjective pen-and-paper tools. Passing one of these evaluations is necessary to obtain a powered wheelchair, so it’s important that we have accurate and unbiased tools to perform them. Training is even more important because poorly trained drivers are more likely to be injured and even hospitalized, while proper training offers a wheelchair user independence and a higher quality of life.

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During my internship, I designed and developed a second version of a data collection device and a user interface for the Powered Mobility Clinical Driving Assessment with Dr. Jorge Candiotti and Dr. Deepan Kamaraj. The data collection device is a Raspberry Pi connected to an Adafruit Sensor that can be attached to a driver’s chair. It communicates wirelessly with the user interface, which is a web application accessible with any mobile device, tablet, or laptop. These tools allow clinicians with minimal technical skill to collect objective data during an evaluation. That data is then processed and aggregated to give specific feedback to clinicians about how a driver can improve or to compare how well different configurations or chairs are working for that driver.

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This prototype is for use in clinics, but with further development it could be used in the home by powered wheelchair users for driving training, as well.

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HERL: Welcome

Documentation

Available for Download

Research Paper

This technical design paper summarizes the goals of my project at HERL and the technical details of the system I developed. It is titled "Design and development of a user interface and data collection device for quantifying electric powered wheelchair driving ability".

Poster

This poster summarizes the paper with several visual aids.

System Diagram

This diagram shows all of the parts of the system that I developed and how they communicate.

Wireframes

These low fidelity wireframes show the early design of the frontend of the system.

HERL: Files
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