Development And Evaluation Of Functional Daily Wear For Wheelchair Users

A functional clothing was designed and developed for wheelchair users in this paper. Rating scale of rehabilitation medicine was introduced to help establish the evaluation criteria and principles of clothing performance to wear off. Combined with level analysis methods of evaluation on clothing performance, the evaluation criteria and principles were applied to objectively evaluate the wear off performance of clothing.In the functional design and making part of this paper, we found out wheelchair users' current situation and needs of clothes through 58 questionnaires about the survey of wheelchair users, and summarized in four conclusions: 1) Most of the respondents are old people; 2) Respondents were more concerned about trousers' convenience to wear off; 3) It is necessary to focus on the innovative design of clothing structure especially the joint bending parts; 4) The most three properties of fabric is comfortably soft, good moisture permeability and heat retention. Under the principles of functionality and comfort, combined with ergonomics, we made some innovative design on style and structure, and chose the right fabric for wheelchair users on the basis of their current daily wear clothing.In the evaluation part of this paper, we used subjective and objective evaluation methods to compare clothing performance between the new functional clothing and the current daily wear of wheelchair users in the wearing experiment.In the subjective evaluation part,6 normal people and 6 wheelchair users participated in the wearing experiment. And there were 5 subjective sensations including thermal, humid, breathable, tight and touching comfortable feeling to be assessed according to the evaluation scale of subjective sensation. The results showed that the new functional clothing was obviously better than their current daily wear clothing on thermal, humid and tight sensations, but did not differ much on breathable and touching comfortable sensations.In the objective evaluation part, firstly, the thermal manikin test method was applied to evaluate the thermal performance of clothing, and the manikin was tested in two postures (standing and sitting). The results showed that the new clothing's heat retention was better than the current daily wear clothing. The heat retention in sitting posture was better than in standing posture when wearing the new clothing, and the sitting effective insulation value approximately increased 64% than the standing one, therefore the new clothing was more suitable for the sitting group (such as wheelchair users) than the current daily wear clothing; secondly, we established the evaluation criteria and principles of clothing performance to wear off, and made movement decomposition and independence analysis in three activities of daily living (dressing off, bathing, using toilet) involved wear off clothing. With the introduction of MBI rating scale of rehabilitation medicine as well as the difficulty degree which frequently used in athletic competition, three-level comparison principle was put forward, considering three factors involved each movement's difficulty degree, time spent and whether it was independent or not, with a domain value figure as a supplementary means in order to quantify the wear off performance of clothing. Then according to this evaluation criteria, we compared the wear off performance between the new clothing and the current daily wear one through analysis of independence and time-consuming in different ADL, in which there were two parts including the previous experiment (6 normal people simulated wheelchair users) and the latter one (6 wheelchair users). The results showed that the wear off performance of the current daily wear clothing got the score of 10 while the new one is 25, which is much higher than 10.Moreover, we made the paired sample t-test between the previous experiment and the latter one, whose subjects are the only difference. The results showed that there was no significant difference between the two parts whether in evaluation of subjective sensation or wear off performance, so we could use normal people to participate in wearing experiment instead of wheelchair users.In this paper, a new functional clothing for wheelchair users was designed to help the physically handicapped and the elderly people meet their comfortable and functional needs of daily wear clothing, and new structure design ideas were provided in fabric, style, structure and function of clothing; An objective evaluation method was proposed as a reference in evaluation and optimization of wear off performance of functional clothing (such as protective clothing, cabin space suit), which has great significance for garment industry innovation.