Page 19 - Mobility Management, October 2018

As for positioning the client’s hand, “The palm of their hand would hit the middle of the hub, where a para’s fingertips would hit the middle of the hub. That’s how much lower we have to get [clients with quadriplegia] into the wheel so they can get the contact point to get their shoulder rocked,
to get the wheel to start up and start moving.”
“I use a Q-Grip friction-coated handrim,” Ramage said. “I use an open thumb, and I have my handrims moved in closer, so I can wedge my thumb between my handrim and
my wheel. A para’s going to be able
to grip the handrim a little bit better than what I can. But if you have less hand function, you’re probably not going to be able to open your thumb as much as I can, so you might have to use more of your palm. Friction coating, rubber coating, plastic coating is what I need, specifically the Q-Grip.”
Transfers: Choosing a Height to Work With
Keeping seat-to-floor heights low on ultralight chairs can be helpful for both accessibility and transferring.
“The way I set my chair up is similar to what a para would,” Ramage said, “because I have my triceps. I can transfer independently; I can get in and out of the vehicle, I can transfer to different surfaces inde- pendently. I think that’s a little bit different from someone with a higher injury, say C6-7, who has limited hand function.”
“I would say that just as much
of a disability in many cases is my height,” Anderson noted. “It’s not that I’m tall, it’s that I’m really tall. So if
I were 6' or 6'2", yes, that’s tall. But when you’re 6'9", if I had a normal front seat height on my chair, I’d have to be somewhere around 23" or 24". Because I do have some sensation in my lower extremities, because I grad- ually swept my legs back [under his seat] over the years, I’m able to sit at a
normal front seat height, which allows me to get underneath a table. What a huge advan- tage that is, just in terms of being able to have a normal conversation with somebody at a meeting or at dinner. With compromised hand function, if you have to sit sideways to the table and then try to eat, it would make everything even that much more difficult.”
Anderson also transfers in and out of his car independently, a fact facilitated by main- taining a relatively low seat-to-floor height: “Since I do drive a car, my front seat height
is at 19-20". If I had it at 23", that’s another 3" that I have to go up to get into my chair.
It’s another 3" that I have to accommodate between my chair and my bed, my chair and my shower chair. All of those things can be modified, but there are things that can’t be modified. You can’t modify an airplane seat. It would have made a lot of transfers difficult, whereas now, everything is pretty good for me in terms of being close enough to my chair
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