Grant: Emerging Team Grant: Alliances in Mobility in Aging (Launch 2)

Power wheelchairs are an expensive yet essential form of assistive technology that can compensate for impaired mobility and improve quality of life for older adults. Despite this benefit, the safe use of these devices can be compromised by decreased cognition and/or functional ability as well as insufficient training; is not uncommon for these devices to be abandoned because they do not meet the needs of the wheelchair user. The overall purpose of this Emerging Team Grant is to improve the mobility opportunities of older adults who use power wheelchairs by addressing three basic questions: 1) How are power wheelchairs used now? 2) How can power wheelchairs be used better?, and 3) How can power wheelchairs be better? Our research plan will specifically enable us to: 1) describe the trajectory of mobility status in older power wheelchair users; 2) develop and assess strategies to maintain and restore wheeled mobility; 3) assess a toolkit of subjective and objective measures to improve research and clinical practice through better assessment of power wheelchairs; and 4) develop clinical approaches and technology to provide environmental support enhancing mobility for existing power wheelchair users as well as an estimated 61-91% of current manual wheelchair users who could benefit from these advances. Our team of 14 clinical researchers and basic scientists have developed a program of research that will use a mixed-methods approach, including lab-based, qualitative and quantitative methodologies, spanning 5 key research projects. These projects will ultimately converge at the end of the 6-year grant when we will leverage our results into a new proposal and funds to conduct a randomized controlled trial in year 7 of the team's existence. Our plan is to assess the effectiveness of our new, collaboratively-controlled wheelchair, in combination with the Wheelchair Skills Program, using the outcome toolkit we will have validated during the tenure of this team grant.