Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center on Physical Access and Transportation for People with Disabilities

Getting from one place to another is how people reach work, school, healthcare, and each other. For many people with disabilities, travel is difficult and sometimes impossible. Public transit can be unreliable or inflexible, paratransit and accessible taxis often have to be booked in advance, and these services are scarcer still in suburban and rural areas. Not everyone has a vehicle they can drive or afford, and flying usually means giving up one’s own wheelchair at the aircraft door.

The RERC on Physical Access and Transportation for People with Disabilities, known as RERC – Move It (Mobility Options for Various Environments In Transportation), works to expand access to transportation and make it easier to use. It is a partnership between the University of Pittsburgh’s Human Engineering Research Laboratories (HERL) and Purdue University, working with health system and community partners that serve people with disabilities. The center carries out research and development projects along with training, dissemination, and technology transfer, and it aims to make transportation technology inclusive, safe, available, affordable, and reliable.

The center’s theme is “Expanding Access and Freedom for the Future of Accessible Transportation.” Its work is organized around two thrusts, the future of personal and on-demand motor vehicle transportation and the future of accessible commercial airline travel, plus a set of education projects. The center is also committed to engineering for people with disabilities by people with disabilities.

Ground transportation

• Electric and autonomous vehicle accessibility design guidelines: electric vehicles are built differently from gasoline vehicles, which changes how they can be adapted for passengers who ride in wheelchairs. This project, led at Purdue by Dr. Brad Duerstock, is developing an interactive tool for assessing accessible design features, testing a range of electric vehicles with participants, and producing inclusive design guidelines for personal, public, paratransit, and autonomous vehicles.
• Accessible parking space and charging station for electric vans: most electric vehicles carry their batteries under the floor, which makes the lowered-floor conversions many wheelchair users rely on difficult or impossible, and charging stations have not been designed with wheelchair users in mind. This project is designing a new kind of accessible parking platform and a charging station setup that wheelchair users can operate.
• Evaluation of the parking space and charging station: wheelchair users give feedback on the designs at each stage, from virtual models to a physical mockup, ending with usability measurements on a revised mockup.

Air transportation

• Guidelines for powered wheelchair and commercial airplane compatibility
• A manual wheelchair for use in airports: design and development and assessment
• A modified airplane seat pallet that lets passengers fly while seated in their own powered wheelchair: design and development and assessment

Education and capacity building

• Summer internships and cooperative study for undergraduates: undergraduates in engineering and rehabilitation sciences, especially students with disabilities, join an active RERC research project with a personal mentor. The program includes a 10-week summer research experience and full-time co-op placements of one to two semesters.
• Transportation experience educational board game: a physical and online game that shows healthcare providers, engineers, and transportation designers and operators the travel barriers people with disabilities face.

Purdue’s RERC activities are based at the Institute for Accessible Science (IAS). Dr. Duerstock leads the electric and autonomous vehicle guidelines project, and Purdue investigators also take part in the parking and charging station design, the undergraduate training programs, and the board game.

Project Investigators

Dr. Brad Duerstock (RERC Co-Director)

Dr. Brandon Pitts (Co-Principal Investigator)

Partner Institution

The RERC is led by the Human Engineering Research Laboratories (HERL) at the University of Pittsburgh, under RERC Director Dr. Rory Cooper. The full team is listed on the RERC – Move It people page.