Factors, effects, and preferences on vehicle driving modification for the Malaysia independent disabled driver

• Main Authors: Mohd. Dahuri, Mohd. Khairulanwar, Hussain, Mohd. Nasir, Mohd. Yusof, Nor Fasiha, Abdul Jalil, Mohamad Kasim
• Format: Article
• Published: Society of Automotive Engineers Malaysia 2017
• Subjects: TJ Mechanical engineering and machinery
• Online Access: http://eprints.utm.my/id/eprint/66114/; http://journal.saemalaysia.org.my/issue/jsaem-1-2-dahuri/

Assistive driving was known to be the important aspect in addressing the mobility limitation, particularly for a person with disabilities. Assistive product modification for vehicle driving, ranging from hand control, secondary control, foot control, and also the wheelchair assisted vehicle developed towards addressing the driving limitation differences according to a person types of disabilities. A pilot survey was conducted to 50 Malaysia independent drivers in Kuala Lumpur. The components evaluated during the survey include, types of modification used, aspects influencing the vehicle modification decision, problem occurrence when in use, as well as to understand the preferential decision differences. The Likert scale (1 to 5) will be used as the rate score given by the responses for each question within the component in the survey. The survey was used as the approach to gather the responses from the respondent. From the survey, it was discovered that aspect such as the disability condition, safer driving, and information availability are several major factors influencing the driver to make modification for independent driving purposes. The major factors were also discovered to influence the modification origin as preferences for driving assistance. The certain least important factors such as the involved body part movement limitation and price range must not be ignored as they also contribute to the improvement for the independent disabled driving.