PHYSICAL LOAD RELATED TO HIGHWAY-DRIVING AMONG DISABLED PEOPLE

Driving environments have been designed basically for travel by physically and mentally unimpaired people. On the other hand, sufficient, special considerations are not given to the vehicles driven by disabled people. In order to examine the ergonomic driving load put on both disabled and physically unimpaired people while they are on highways, the driving conditions and the muscle-stress of disabled people were evaluated on the approach to curves. Also the influence of acceleration-and-deceleration and centrifugal force on vehicles were evaluated in straight, split and inter-flows of traffic. The subjects of this study consisted of 5 physically unimpaired people and 10 disabled people who required auxiliaries for their vehicles due to handicaps of their lower limbs or to both upper and lower limbs. The study was conducted on the loop line of the Hanshin Expressway in Osaka, Japan. As a result of measuring the accelerated velocity of vehicles in motion and electromyograms of drivers of the vehicles, it was found that the driving load of disabled people is heavier than that of physically unimpaired people. It was also found that certain driving conditions are different for disabled people to travel at high speed.