Concurrent Design Strategy for Improving Public Wheelchairs for People with Disabilities

Abstract

Traveling abroad is an easy activity for regular individuals, but it can be an inconvenience to those with disabilities. To ensure airport and aviation security, passengers with disabilities are required to fold and check-in their wheelchairs, use an airport-supplied wheelchair, present themselves at the airline counter, and go through a security check. Once they enter the cabin, they move to another wheelchair, which is designed to fit in the cabin aisles. Such an accessibility service of requiring passengers with disabilities to move from the airline counter in one wheelchair and then change to another in order to reach the cabin is inconvenient and underlines. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a new type of wheelchair. Based on the aforementioned reasons, this study will use a concurrent design strategy to design a wheelchair as described earlier according to the concept of simultaneous design. First, find out the positioning of the product, then use the target tree to formulate the design specification, and use the finite structure analysis method (FSM) to conceive and diverge. Then select the best solution based on PUGH concept matrix selection, and complete the detailed design and 3D model. The results show that this procedure can simplify wheelchair design, improve the competitiveness of wheelchairs in the market, meet the needs of people with disabilities, ensure wheelchair quality, and enhance the likelihood of its mass production.


 


 


Keywords: disabilities, concurrent design, objective tree analysis, pugh decisionmatrix method

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