Effect of seat height on manual wheelchair foot propulsion, a repeated-measures crossover study: part 2 – wheeling backward on a soft surface
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose: The aim of this study was to test the hypotheses that, during manual-wheelchair foot propulsion backward on a soft surface, lowering the seat height increases speed, push frequency and push effectiveness, and decreases perceived difficulty.Materials and methods: In a repeated-measures crossover study, 50 able-bodied participants used one foot to propel a manual wheelchair 5 m backward on a soft surface at 5 seat heights, ranging from 5.08 cm below to about 5.08 cm above lower-leg length, in random order. We recorded Wheelchair Skills Test (WST) capacity scores and used the Wheelchair Propulsion Test (WPT) to calculate speed (m/s), push frequency (cycles/s) and push effectiveness (m/cycle). We also recorded the participants’ perceived difficulty (0–4) and video-recorded each trial.Results: WST capacity scores were reduced at the higher seat heights. Using repeated-measures models (adjusted for age, sex and order), there were negative relationships between seat height and speed (p < 0.0001) and push effectiveness (p < 0.0001). Lowering the seat height by 5.08 cm below lower-leg length corresponded to improvements in speed of 0.097 m/s and in push effectiveness of 0.101 m/cycle. The trend for push frequency was also significant (p = 0.035) but the effect size was smaller. Perceived difficulty increased with seat height (p < 0.0001). The video-recordings provided qualitative kinematic data regarding the seated “gait cycles”.Conclusions: During manual-wheelchair foot propulsion backward on a soft surface, lowering the seat height increases speed and push effectiveness, and decreases perceived difficulty.IMPLICATIONS FOR REHABILITATIONBackward wheelchair foot propulsion on soft surfaces is affected by seat height.Speed (m/s) is improved if the seat height is lowered.Push effectiveness (m/gait cycle) is improved if the seat height is lowered.Perceived difficulty of propulsion is lower if the seat height is lowered.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".