COMPUTATIONAL MODELING AND NUMERICAL SIMULATION OF NEW WHEELCHAIR SEAT-BACK SYSTEMS TO IMPROVE COMFORT AND POSTURAL ADEQUACY FOR CHILDREN WITH MOTOR DISABILITIES

Resumo

Physical or motor disability may be considered a body structure or function disorder that interferes with
the movement and locomotion of the individual, and this may impact several activities such as school and work.
The current work focused on the development of assistive technology and postural adequacy areas, aiming the
social inclusion of children with motor disabilities in the educational system in the Pernambuco state. In this work,
a computational model was developed to represent the current seat-back system used by children. In order to
simulate representative loading conditions, it was used temperature digital data collected in the seat-back system
through the thermography technique. Those data have been transformed into pressure maps and implemented as
mechanical loads in the computational model. Numerical simulations were then performed using the commercial
software COMSOL Multiphysics®. The results of the simulations were analyzed to identify critical stress
concentration zones and high contact pressure in the actual seat-back system, which can possibly lead to bedsores
and discomfort. The next step of the work was to propose new seat-back systems, improving better posture and
comfort to the children. Therefore, new mathematical models were implemented in the software to test and
evaluate the performance of different foams.