Elder-centered electric mobility scooter design

• Main Authors: Li-Chun Huang, 黃立鈞
• Other Authors: Wen-Ko Chiou
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2004
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/69951704780066239018

碩士 === 長庚大學 === 工業設計研究所 === 92 === In the recent years, many countries have stepped in the ageing societies; this ageing trend in Taiwan will become more and more conspicuous in few years. In the future, the population of older people will become a very important market. With the age increasing, the decline of older people’s ability of acting can’t be ignored as well. The ability of acting involves personal independent action, demand, and recovered ability, etc, affect a lot of factors, therefore, the phenomenon that older people use electric mobility scooter will become more and more widespread. Because older people their physical and mental characteristics have their own special demand, the present electric mobility scooter design can satisfy older user’s demand or not (for example: function and expansibility, etc.), their operate process (for example: the problem happened when they sit on the scooter or get off the scooter, the position and operate way of adjustments of the seat and tiller) have what kind of operational problem and difficulty? Moreover, the working environment of mobility scooter (have gradient and different from general road situation) will emerge what safety and operational problem when older people use electric mobility scooter in this kind of environment, these is what the research will investigate. This study use interactive user-product-environment system, focus on these older people who live in Chang Gung Health Promotion and Cultural Village, use practical design aspect, literature investigation, working environment observation, actual driving observation, etc. proceeding the system analysis and data integration. In the process, we find some problems and demands which different from the general users and road situations. This study use present electric mobility scooter as a implement of previous experiment, because of safety problem, the previous experiment divide into two parts. One it’s participants is 13 older people who live in Chang Gung Health Promotion and Cultural Village, the other is 4 MA students of Chang Gung University to do this actual driving test. The experiment use task observation and questionnaire to find the safety problem in this operating process. Then after improving this problems, we proceed the second experiment to test the refined design can efficiently solve the problem or not. hope to provide the elder-centered mobility scooter design guideline and suggestion. The result of this study found some evident problems, (1) The vibration, stability, and safety problem of electric mobility scooter when it is use in some environment like Chang Gung Health Promotion and Cultural Village; (2) For older people, the positions and operate way of adjustments of present electric mobility scooter are unsuited for them; (3) the present electric mobility scooter can’t satisfy older people’s demand. Trough the literature investigation, experiment observation and user interview, we propose some design proposal like suspension system, new adjustment position and operate way, and some other design to show every consideration to older people. After testing this refined design, the result shows that older people have more satisfaction and convenience. Trough the result of this study, we hope that it can provide some comparison and reference to relevant researches, and apply it to the practical design to improve the users’ satisfaction and convenience, let older people have more comfortable, safe, and convenient mobility scooter operating process.