Out-Front’s SmartWheel

• By Laurie Watanabe
• Jan 29, 2008

If you are a rehab veteran, you might have heard of SmartWheel, a tool that measures users’ manual wheelchair propulsion to detect potential problems. As such, SmartWheel in the past has been most often seen in rehab centers.

That’s about to change, thanks to Out-Front, which has been working to adapt SmartWheel to the industry’s evolving needs for documentation and evidence-based outcomes.

This “next-generation” SmartWheel still measures a user’s propulsion technique.
“SmartWheel provides a tremendous amount of data,” says Out-Front’s Ron Boninger, “but there are three really important parameters you can look at, which are velocity, push frequency and force.”

Those three measurements are vital, Boninger says, to measure whether a client can safely and efficiently use a manual chair.

“Take velocity as one example,” Boninger says. “If you can’t reach a certain velocity when you’re propelling a chair, based on your functional capability, you’re not able to safely cross the street. That might be one example in which power-assist or a power chair might be justified.”

But beyond collecting measurements, SmartWheel now works in tandem with clinical practice guidelines created by the Consortium of Spinal Cord Medicine in 2005. The guidelines discuss how to most effectively push, how often and with how much force — all of which SmartWheel can measure and report. “Those were evidence-based practice guidelines, and they were set up to try as much as possible to look at evidence objectively and then make recommendations that make sense,” Boninger says.

In addition to those guidelines, Out-Front now has a SmartWheel Users Group, a way for rehab professionals to share their SmartWheel information. Boninger says, “When we first started to offer SmartWheel, we decided we wanted to have a standard clinical protocol (for) anyone who uses the SmartWheel. We wanted to develop reference values for the average force, for example, it takes the average person to push a wheelchair.”

Boninger adds that the User Group information is due to be published in the Archives of Physical Medicine. That kind of recognition could make it easier for clinicians and rehab suppliers to document client need for manual or power mobility, or for power-assist systems.

But how easy is SmartWheel to use? “The software is set up to automatically create reports and measure the data that you need,” Boninger says. “When we started this, we realized that clinicians do not have a lot of time in their day. So in order for this to be successful, we needed to make this as easy and intuitive as possible.” Out-Front offers in-services to buyers, and its Web site includes plenty of resources.

“Once you start to use it regularly, it becomes very simple to use,” Boninger explains.

With Out-Front’s added emphasis on user resources and evidence-based outcomes, Boninger agrees clinicians specializing in seating and mobility could benefit from SmartWheel. And he says that having SmartWheel could give rehab suppliers a competitive advantage.

“You can be a leader on the justification side of it, but you could also take the next step of doing propulsion training,” Boninger says. It’s a leading edge tool that would set you apart in terms of the servicing you’d be providing.”

Out-Front/Three Rivers
1826 West Broadway Rd., Suite 43
Mesa, AZ 85202
(480) 833-1834
www.thesmartwheel.com

This article originally appeared in the March 2008 issue of HME Business.