Development of the Support System for Wheelchair Use at Boarding and Alighting Trains

The number of wheelchair users who travel by rail in Japan has increased in recent years. However, they still require assistance when boarding and alighting a train because there is a step and a gap between the station platform and the train. Therefore, autonomous movement of wheelchair users through railway is restricted. In order to solve these issues. This study proposes an assistance device that can be operated manually by the wheelchair user and thus enable autonomous movement when boarding and alighting a train without caregiver's assistance. The design condition of the proposed device is to overcome a step and gap of up to 200 mm by user's manual operation. In addition to the device design and manufacture based on the ISO standard, this paper shows the analysis results of the run vibration experiment with a dummy.