Wheelchair for 21st Century - Do You Like it?
When choosing, buying and using a product, never mind whether it is a electric wheelchair, mobility scooter, electric car or a glucose meter for diabetes… technology does play an important role, but what really makes or breaks user experience is the design.
Therefore we have to thank designers, that help push technology further every year - making it smaller, cooler, friendlier and more ergonomic… One of the biggest design contests for technology is the Autodesk's Inventor Student Design Competition organized by Technische Universiteit of Eindhoven in the Netherlands.
This year a team of Polish design students (Michal Piersa, Milosz Jamrozy, Igor Modelski,Bogusz Radziemski, Rafal Krzysiak and Kamil Ruszczyk) from Politechnika Warszawska University won a grand prize for their design of futuristic wheelchair!
Quick inspection of design reveals that wheelchair is manual, designed to be driven by muscular force. The main invention is inclusion of gyroscope mounted underneath the centrally positioned seat. This concept is already known from Segway and some other stair climbing electric wheelchair models (check out our review of iBot). This allows wheelchair to remain vertically stable while only using two wheels. Hidden on the rendered picture, but visible when inspecting model in 3D (you can download the Autodesk's DWF file here for free), is the battery required to power the gyroscope. What kind of battery is used, is unknown, as this is more of a concept than a blueprint for actual product…
The wheelchair has a set of gearings mounted on both 26" diameter wheels. The frame consists of two flat springs that are connected to a hard gyroscope box and through a liner guide to the seat's hard frame. The seat is connected to the liner guide by a set of clips.
If manual wheelchairs will slowly progress towards gyroscopes, then we wonder what awaits the electric wheelchairs… (but read our next story, we are preparing on this subject, as interesting things are just around the corner)
Click here for a large picture of the model.
Keywords: wheelchair, manual wheelchair, self balancing wheelchair
