Why Wheelchair Belts Should Not Be Mounted Like Car Seatbelts | S2 EP2 with Barend ter Haar

But for people who don't know, what are ISO standards in general and why do we need them in wheelchair seating?

ISO standards are a means that everywhere in the world is doing the same thing consistently, talking the same language.

A good example might be if you are painting your back room and suddenly run out of paint, when you go and buy another pot of the paint, Because of the international standards, you know it's going to be the same colour as you run out of, so you don't have suddenly a two-tone backroom.

An interesting area was, of course, where we drive.

There are standards for some countries to drive on the right-hand side of the road, like in Australia, UK, and others on the left.

Sweden used to drive on the right, but they found that when people were going to and from Norway or Denmark or whatever, they're having a nasty accident.

So back in September 1967, they decided, we're all going to move over to driving on the left.

So...

There's one hour in the early morning when nobody could drive.

And then after that, everybody had moved to the other side of the road.

So standards are quite useful.

And some of them are useful in the wheelchair world.

We've got a series of standards for testing wheelchairs to see that they are strong enough, that they perform in certain ways.

that will be consistent.

So when you know you've passed the standard, those can be descriptive standards or they can be pass-fail standards.

We have crash testing standards where you can have a wheelchair being tested for its safety in a crash.

Most of the testing to date has tended to be how safe the other people in the vehicle as compared with how safe the occupant of the wheelchair is.