From the
Chronicle of Higher Ed. Here's the
YouTube video of the wheelchair being used in Africa.
Tens of millions of disabled people in developing countries who need wheelchairs don’t have them, and many of those with wheelchairs own models that aren’t versatile enough to use both indoors and on rugged terrain. Amos G. Winter’s new creation, the "leveraged freedom chair," might ease those problems.
Mr. Winter, a doctoral student in mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, built the first version of the tricycle-wheelchair hybrid last summer in Kenya. He and a few undergraduates built eight prototypes of the wheelchair, called the LFC (pictured), using cheap, widely available bicycle parts. They distributed six LFC’s to people in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania to test, and Mr. Winter returned for follow-up interviews in January.
Disabled people in developing countries rely on hand-powered tricycles or traditional wheelchairs if they can afford them, but Mr. Winter says neither work well on diverse terrain. He designed his chair, which has three wheels and is powered by hand levers, to negotiate smooth pavement, mud, and hills as well as indoors. “Think of it as kind of like a crowbar,” he says. “With a long lever distance, you don’t have to push very hard to create a lot of force back at the wheel.”
To go fast, the user grasps the lever closer to the pivot and pumps quickly. The levers are detachable, so the chair can be powered like a traditional wheelchair as well.
Another advantage of the new wheelchair is that it is built with parts from the most popular model of bicycle in developing countries. The bicycles, which are made by Phoenix in China and by Avon in India, are the same model as single-speed British racing bicycles from the early 1900s. Mr. Winter collected parts from nine developing countries and found that they matched. So if an LFC breaks, it can be locally repaired by anyone who can fix a bicycle, and its parts are easily replaceable.
Discussions with people using the prototype, he says, showed that it is a little too bulky to use easily indoors, the seat is too high, and the chair feels too tippy. All these problems, he says, can be fixed in the next verison.
Mr. Winter plans to make 30 modified prototypes for testing in Guatemala this summer. He hopes to spend next year in India working on a final model and testing about 100 around the country. The eventual LFC is to be made by various manufacturers and distributed around the world. It will cost about $200, which is about the same price as a traditional wheelchair in the countries where it will be used.
From the Chronicle of Higher Ed. Here's the YouTube video of the wheelchair being used in Africa.
