Ahhh I want this so bad! I'm a wheelchair user and moving things around is incredibly frustrating, since you need both hands free to push the wheels. You can kinda get away with holding a cup of water by pushing one wheel at a time and switching the cup from hand to hand, or pushing off of countertops with your free hand, but it's annoying and dangerous if you're moving fragile items or hot liquids.
I really hope this doesn't cost too much. Disabled people tend not to have much money, and my insurance company wouldn't even pay for ramps, much less something like this.
> since you need both hands free to push the wheels
My niece was born without legs, and only one arm. She has a wheelchair that can be operated with one hand. It has the 2 metal push bars fitted to one side of the chair. The left bar is connected to the left wheel, the right bar to the right wheel. You can grab both with one hand. By moving both at the same time you go straight, or grab one ring to steer. It works really intuitively.
I believe this one-hand option was custom designed for her use-case (which would be about 30 years ago now), but since then many other people that have both arms tried her chair, and immediately contacted the manufacturer to order a chair with the one-hand option. AFAIK the manufacturer now offers the one-hand option on all their chairs.
This seems like a very logical and cheap thing to include in every wheelchair design... I don't know why they all don't have it!
Other 'obvious' design improvements that seem to be missing:
* Wheel-assist - an electric motor pushes along with you to stop you getting tired arms, but still give you the feeling of direct control you don't get with a typical joystick controlled electric. Little 100 watt brushless motors with controllers are only $3 now, and that would be plenty of assistance for going up ramps.
* Auto brakes - a sensor brakes the wheels whenever a hand isn't touching the rim of the wheel - and that can be a software only feature enabled by the above assistance motor...
Etc... It seems wheelchairs are crazy expensive yet don't have most of the features an undergrad student would build as a 'for fun' project.
I have the "wheel-assist" you describe - the Yamaha NaviOne. it works incredibly well, and without it I would need a full power chair since my arms are fragile.
Auto brakes as you describe would be really annoying since it would make the alternate-hand technique impossible, and most wheelchair users stop touching the rims between strokes. (I use the handrim grip favored by quadriplegics because of my arms, so I so keep my hands on the rims at all times, but it's not ideal.)
I agree that disability aids are quite overpriced and lackluster in general, but I love my Yamaha wheels.
The reasons are regulatory, not BoM costs. Getting a new medical device approved is hard, and that becomes much harder when you’ve got electronics that could hurt the user, or leave them stranded.
I'm not actually sure wheelchairs are approved as medical devices. Certainly not the same way pacemakers are. A friend of mine recently had her power chair go haywire on her and try to kill her, which sounded like a melted MOSFET from how she described the repair job. The wheelchair company apparently elected not to recall that model because it only happens to 1% of users.
If I were a wheelchair user, I'd be pissed if my government was putting in place laws that were supposed to protect me, but were in fact making my quality of life worse every day because all innovations that might make my life better were being stifled.
I recently injured my spine (a "tiny myelopathy" and a series of larger radiculopathies) and have recently been assessed for a chair I can sit in for >1 hour without being in pain.
It costs (in USD, although I do not live in the US) nearly $2200. I do not believe it costs anything like that much to manufacture. Added together with a desk, arm supports, and table that they recommended and you end up with nearly $10000 in costs.
Someone, somewhere is making a lot of money out of healthcare systems.
There’s a pretty cool kids show in Germany (Sendung mit der Maus) and in one of the last sequels they showed how the customized seat padding for a wheelchair is made. And that involves a shit-ton of back and forth, measuring, cnc-cutting, fine tuning, adjusting and all of it mostly one-off manual labor with expensive machiner. I’m certain someone is making money off that, but given the amount of highly specialized labor that went into this, I believe 2200 USD is reasonable.
(If you run the math, that’s roughly 2-3 days of work for an engineer that earns 250k, without even considering all attached costs)
If it really turns out useful, I'm 100% sure other companies will manufacture it, too (and I'd expect an open version at some point, too). I mean, technically it's not that complicated, it's details that matter.
I wouldn't say Alexa integration, Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM), object/room detection (dining room etc), setting up those trays around the house and calibrate it, collision avoidance, path planning through obstacles, 3D depth data processing (I see two Realsense i455 cameras) is "technically not that complicated"
I mean sure most of above can be setup with MoveIT if hardware is already assembled, but making it fail proof for 100s of different houses and use cases is an engineering effort
What I mean it's not some new revolutionary tech but something that we've been using for years integrated and put to a good use. I bet there will be many people interested in having a less advanced version that costs $700, not $7000. That is, if the original deliver on its promises - there's often a significant discrepancy between how a product is marketed and what the first customers say.
Agree with everything you said. But equally these are all things that robot vacuum cleaners already do.
Obviously the stakes are a little higher with a mobility assistance device. But the fundamentals of the technology are well solved already, and I wouldn’t be surprised if companies like Roomba would be interested in working in their space, or licensing some of their tech to companies in this space.
Call then up, and ask for one to review. It would look good on their part if they gave you one. This is the first home robotic gizmo that caught my attention.
This devise has a lot of potential uses. I bet we will see these in resturants.
I really hope this doesn't cost too much. Disabled people tend not to have much money, and my insurance company wouldn't even pay for ramps, much less something like this.