The reasearch project entitled Intelligent Hybrid Vehicle for Individual Transportation of People with Reduced Mobility , named furthur through the acronym WHEEL-EE (from WHEEL chair, E nergy- E fficient), is funded by National Council of Research in Higher Education (CNCSIS acronym in Romanian) and will be implemented by Technical University of Cluj-Napoca (UTCN), Cluj, Romania. The project started on July 28, 2010 and will run over 3 years.
Project Motivation
In recent years, in Romania has been made considerable legislative efforts regarding the society integration of persons with locomotor disabilities, in view of their greater independence and finding a suitable job. In this regard, the National Authority for Disabled People (NADP) attached to the Romanian Ministry of Labour, Family and Social Welfare, has launched a series of proposals. Thus, from 16 projects submitted in 2009, 4 of them have received funding approval, all topics being related to the idea of social life integration of handicapped people, and none of them concerns technological achievements in this field (source: www.anph.ro , Anexxe nr. 423/25.09.2009).
Other NGOs in this field have focused exclusively on social integration of persons with locomotor disabilities, but in the latter individual transport innovative technological solutions are almost nonexistent. In 2004 there was a project called SATRANS (source: www.icpe.ro/satrans.htm ), the only reference which was found by our team) and it seems to be a solitary project, limited in complexity (from technological point of view, as innovation, it was proposed an intelligent control of DC motor excited by permanent magnets). Even at European level, in terms of technology, things have not advanced much in this respect, the developed projects (under FP6 for example) are primarily designed to transport accessibility for persons with locomotor disabilities (source: www.euro-access.org ). From statistical data that is provided by NAPH, it was reported that there are 78 000 of handicapped adults (plus children and adolescents). In addition, in the category of persons with reduced mobility can be included also the elderly, who, because of their health, are becoming more and more isolated. The latest statistics recorded in 2006, from 21.57 million Romanian, a total of 3 191 446 people aged over 65 years (source: www.krimket.ro/statistics-romania.php ). This means that the project targets approximately 20% of Romanians.