PROJECT II – THE NATURAL HISTORY AND MEASUREMENT OF POWER MOBILITY OUTCOMES

Purpose and Objectives: The overall purpose of this research project is to describe the variation in power mobility over a two-year period among various cohorts of wheelchair users. Nested within this project is a study of the psychometric properties of a toolkit of measures that will advance our knowledge and understanding of essential outcomes for power mobility users.
Specific objectives include:

Objective 1: To describe the variability or natural history of power wheelchair use over a two-year period in cohorts of older adults who use power wheelchairs. Because this work is exploratory we do not pose specific hypotheses for this objective. However we do anticipate variation in the duration of wheelchair use (distance traveled and displacements) do to seasonal variations; reduced caregiver burden for the caregivers of individuals receiving their first power wheelchair, and improved satisfaction with the activities performed while using the wheelchair among both cohorts who are receiving new power wheelchairs.

Objective 2: To assess the reliability (test-retest, intra-rater and inter-rater) of the power wheelchair outcome toolkit.

Objective 3: To assess the validity of the power wheelchair outcome toolkit.

Please refer to our Power Mobility Outcome Toolkit page to read more about the results of this project.