Abstract

With new technologies and advances in the medical field, much effort is spent on improving medical devices. One such assistive device is a wheelchair. Many of the existing wheelchairs do not address all the needs of disabled people. Developing a dynamic wheelchair that helps disabled people who have extensor thrust is a challenging problem. Because of strong competition between different mobility device manufacturing companies, developing a dynamic wheelchair using product development tools becomes an effective technique for reducing development time, which can be a competitive weapon. One development tool that can be used to manage and analyze product development activities is the Design Structure Matrix (DSM). The DSM is an information exchange model that can help to find the relationship between activities, parameters, or tasks in order to minimize product development time. The goal of this research is to develop an instrumented, active seating system for people with extensor thrust using the DSM method to provide an efficient execution sequence of the design tasks for three subsystems of the seat: the seat back, seat bottom, and footrest. Furthermore, some numerical evaluation methods are presented to provide the optimal ordering of groups of design activities, in the DSM so that the total design time is minimized. This thesis provides a detailed application of the use of the DSM in developing a dynamic wheelchair for people with extensor thrust.