The wheelchair is the adjuvant to rehabilitation of the disabled. Whenever a person has to spend much of his time in a wheelchair, an appropriate wheelchair must be prescribed. Wheelchairs should be fitted to each patient rather than fitting the patient to the wheelchair. Therefore a rehabilitation facility should have available sample chairs of different sizes with various special features including detachable armrests, detachable footrests, reclining backs, etc.
The authors have studied 120 Korean disabled adults who were wheelchair users and 466 normal adults as a control group in order to provide basic data for making standard wheelchairs for Korean disabled adults.
The results are as follows:
In the disabled group, 60°o were paraplegia, 25.8°o quadriplegia, 9.2% hemiplegia, 2.5% amputee with paraplegia and 2.5% were cerebral palsy.
All of the disabled adults in our study did not possess an appropriate wheelchair in terms of their disability and body size. There was a statistical significance between male and. female body dimension measurements in the normal as well as in the disabled group(p< 0.05). Standard dimensions included seat width 40.8 cm, seat depth 45.2 cm, back height 41.6 cm, arm height 30.3 cm. and seat height 48.9 cm for Korean male adults; and seat width 40.1 cm, seat depth 43.3 cm, back height 37.8 cm, arm height 28.7 cm and seat height 44.6 cm for Korean female adults.
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