A Decision Support System for Remote Wheelchair Selection in Telerehabilitation
By Kim, Yun Seon; Kim, Kyoung-Yun; Schein, Richard; Schmeler, Mark; Proceedings of the 2007 Industrial Engineering Research Conference,Publication Date: May 2007
Paper presents the Remote Wheelchair Selection Advisor (RWS-A), a Java-based decision-support tool for selecting an appropriate wheeled mobility device (WMD) for a patient with mobility impairments during a telerehabilitation (TR) assessment. TR is defined as a rehabilitation environment in which the use of telecommunication technology provides rehabilitation support to people with disabilities in remote regions. The RWS-A was developed at the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center on Telerehabilitation (RERC-TR), funded by the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR) in the U.S. Department of Education. The tool is intended for use by clinicians following a physician referral of a patient. Functionalities and features of the RWS-A include (1) the WMD browsing capability listing products and their manufacturers; (2) a reusable WMD repository, established based on the new Power Mobility Device (PMD) codes of the Healthcare Common Procedure Coding System; (3) an advanced WMD sorting capability to accommodate customized queries; (4) Internet-based plug-and-play capability enabling the RWS-A to be integrated with other TR tools; and (5) systematic WMD evaluating and ranking using evaluation criteria. The real patient case of a 67-year-old man with paraplegia and carpal tunnel syndrome is presented to demonstrate the use of these functionalities, resulting in a list of 5 recommended PMDs ranked in order of relevance from 100 to 37.5 percent. Research plans for further development of the RWS-A are discussed.
Published by: Institute of Industrial Engineers (Website:http://www.iienet2.org/Default.aspx)
This publication is included in the library of the National Rehabilitation Information Center (NARIC), accession number O17454
