After spending most of January in East Africa testing his invention, MIT mechanical engineering doctoral candidate Amos Winter has unveiled the Leveraged Freedom Chair, which is something of a desk chair/mountain bike hybrid--"something you can comfortably sit in all day and maneuver around the office, but also use to efficiently commute to and from work." If you're wondering if you can maneuver in the chair while charging your iPad, this one's not for you. Winter and a team of MIT undergrads and international design collaborators designed the LFC "for people who grew up in a village where they were literally dragging themselves to school." Some 20 million people in developing countries require wheelchairs, according to the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the chairs that are available aren't designed for people who need to push through muddy roads and paths. Winter has studied wheelchair production in Third World countries since 2005 and estimates that 70 percent of those requiring wheelchairs live in rural areas where regular ones just don't work.
After testing prototypes for four months, Winter is using a $50,000 grant he recently won from the Inter-American Development Bank to tweak the current design as he prepares for large-scale production, which he hopes will provide local manufacturers with the tools to build hundreds of chairs per month, thereby boosting local economies. Users can change their mechanical advantage in the chair by moving the hand position of two levers located on either side of the chair, going fast on flat ground or producing enough torque to travel over sand or through mud. The levers are removable and hook into a simple bicycle drivetrain converted to the wheelchair using readily available bike parts, so that building and repairing the chair is possible with a hacksaw, welder, drill, and vice. Winter says in MIT's news report that after testing the chair recently, he learned that though it is more efficient than a regular wheelchair at plowing through mud and over stones, he still needs to make the chair lighter by lowering the seat four inches and shifting the wheels back two inches, eliminating the need for bulky mounting brackets that attach the rear wheels to the chair.
Abdullah Munish, a Tanzanian spinal injury survivor who lives in a hilly town with rough roads and who has tested various wheelchairs during the past decade, tells Winter that the chair is "strong and stable in African terrain, and you can travel long distances and uphill without using too much energy. "I would say that we have [a] life saver...I just call it my little angel machine," Munish said. The Zuckerberg Manifesto: Facebook will save the worldOver 20 million people in developing countries need a wheelchair to access education and employment. However, standard wheelchairs are difficult to use on rough terrain and usually break on the uneven roads. Originally one of the top four finalists for MassChallenge, a start-up accelerator in Boston, MA, SolidWorks customer Global Research Innovation & Technology (GRIT) has developed the Leveraged Freedom Chair with a unique drivetrain to help navigate the bumps. The lever drivetrain technology, built from bicycle parts which are easily accessible in any rural village in developing countries, enables users to travel over 80% faster than a standard wheelchair.
GRIT’s Leveraged Freedom Chair has evolved from its beginning as an MIT Mobility Lab project (collaborating with the Association for the Physically Disabled of Kenya) into an independent company partnering with various labs at MIT. The company is actively working to transform cutting-edge academic research into affordable, effective and appropriate technologies for the developing world. Using SolidWorks Standard, GRIT has successfully built models and drawings of the LFC that they can easily share with the manufacturers in India. SolidWorks has allowed GRIT to design with sustainability, collaboration and innovation in mind thereby allowing people with disabilities to gain mobility and improve their lives. To learn more about other MassChallenge finalists using SolidWorks, click here. Want to see how SolidWorks can help you win new business and get to market faster? Request an in-person SolidWorks demo today. CAD in SOLIDWORKS Without Sacrificing Time or Comfort
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