WheelUp! Developing an Interactive Electric-power Wheelchair Virtual Training Environment

Standard power wheelchair training is considered inadequate by clinicians and users due to insufficient means to evaluate user performance in varying environments. Virtual environment training offers a promising alternative by providing users with more practical opportunities while reducing the time demands on clinicians. However, there is a need to further explore and optimize game design elements and strategies to ensure engaging and effective training experiences for a diverse range of users. This paper presents our progress of WheelUp!, an open-source electric wheelchair virtual reality (VR) simulator. The simulator offers modularity for clinician-controlled difficulty adjustment, immediate visual and audio feedback, and a visualization tool to aid in clinical assessment and monitoring of progress. This is the first step to building an interactive platform to address the inadequacy of wheelchair training.