Dimensionamento de um dinamômetro inercial para PcD cadeirantes

Abstract

The social well-being of wheelchair users is related to their physical and psychological conditions, accessibility, and insertion in the job market. The development of low-cost assistive technologies comes to improve the quality of life of these people. The inertial dynamometer proposed aims to assist in the rehabilitation and development of motor skills of PwD (people with disabilities) wheelchair users and, thus, enable them to perform their daily activities more independently. It also aims to enable health professionals to evaluate the cardiovascular physiology of wheelchair users. Thus, in the present work, it is performed the project dimensioning and calibration of the device to evaluate the performance and physical conditioning of wheelchair users. In a first step, the equipment was calculated to attend the measurement of power imposed by a wheelchair user and the moment of inertia of the dynamometer cylinder was estimated. Subsequently, the instrumentation of the equipment was performed, in which the gravitational potential energy of reference was used to quantify the total inertia that is dependent on the moment of inertia and the rolling frictions involved. A practical experiment was performed, in which an element of mass 2,5 kg, suspended by a wire, pulled and rotated the cylinder of inertia. From the measurement of the acceleration in the cylinder, with different masses placed on the wheelchair positioned on the dynamometer, an equation that governs the behavior of the total forces acting on the system (inertial and friction) was obtained, to be used in evaluations when the propulsive source on the dynamometer is the wheelchair user.