Biomechanical analysis of the propulsion of the manual wheelchair in patients with spinal cord injury

Manual wheelchair Users (MWU) may develop injuries due to mechanical stress caused by propulsion. The technique they used to propel the wheelchair increases the risk, this can be explained because the overuse of the anterior muscles of the joint respect to posterior muscles, generates muscle imbalance [1]. It takes little importance in the technique to propel, and there are no technologies to measure the propulsion available in all hospitals. In the present project a wheelchair ergometer and a 17 rotational degrees of freedom (DOF) biomechanical model were developed to allocate the kinematic parameters to the subject during propulsion, this DOF are associated to shoulder, elbow and wrist joints using seven MTx sensors from Xsens Technologies, each of them associated to a determined anatomic segment. A visual live feedback virtual interface was developed using Visual C++ to create a 3D skeletal model associated to the movement of each anatomic segment, furthermore angle, velocity and acceleration graphics were generated for each joint movement.