Posture & Mobility Group Conference 2016

Thomas Day recently went to the Posture and Mobility Group (PMG) conference at the ICC in Birmingham. He was awarded a bursary to attend both days of the conference as well as access to the exhibition, a ticket to the gala dinner and two nights accommodation at a local hotel. Thomas presented his work from the Wheelchair-VR project - a virtual reality simulator designed to aid people in learning how to manouevre a powered wheelchair. As part of the presentation, he presented the results of a validation study recently completed at the Thornton Science Park. The results of the study showed that those who used the simulator with a virtual reality headset improved more, i.e. took less time to complete an obstacle course, than those who just used the desktop or those who were in the control group. ​

During his time at the conference, Thomas had the opportunity to network with people from all over the country and gain insight into the different areas of Posture and Mobility. He also discussed potential future developments for the project and potential areas to expand into, these included training wheelchair manouvres to:

• those who have neglect in one of their visual fields, i.e. after a stroke;
• young children in paediatrics;
• those who will go into a manual wheelchair.

Downloads

Download the pdf file of the presentation Training Powered Wheelchair Manoeuvres in Virtual Reality here.