Stakeholder views addressing the development and uptake of powered wheelchair assistive technology

AbstractPurpose: The objective of this research is to identify stakeholder views with regard to the development of effective powered wheelchair assistive technologies more suited to the user and carer needs, whilst also meeting the requirements for other stakeholders, such that developers can be better guided towards producing solutions which have a better chance of getting to the market place and hence to the end user.Method: A questionnaire was designed to collect the views of all stakeholders and circulated to a statistically representative number of them. The question rating data were then checked for correlation between groups, and within groups, to establish validity.Results: The 74 stakeholders across the eight classes who responded had a good correlation between each other, with a cross class “Pearson’s correlation” ranging between 0.7 and 0.95, and the “Fleiss’s Kappa reliability of agreement” within each class ranging between 0.07 and 0.36.Conclusions: This research has identified that all stake...