THINKING ABOUT
WHEELCHAIRS

The Wheelchair Spectrum

The spectrum of wheelchairs being manufactured and prototyped today includes:

• a surprisingly robust $77.91 product produced by the Free Wheelchair Mission whose mission is to "Transform lives through the gift of mobility to the physically disabled poor in developing countries as motivated by Jesus Christ"

• the broad TiLite 2GX, Rascal, Graham-Field, and 21st Century Scientific genre of wheelchairs

• wheelchairs capable of positioning a person seated on the floor or elevated above standard chair height, as well as chairs that enable a person to approach a standing position

• chairs that can climb stairs and balance upright on two wheels while carring a person

• niche wheelchairs such as tennis chairs, racing chairs, hand cycles, the Floating Beach Chair, and the all-terrain wheelchairs with tank-like treads.

• and experimental or just plain unique wheelchairs like the "Superfourin wheelchair" developed by Germany's Fraunhofer Institute for Information and Data Processing IITB in conjunction with Otto Bock HealthCare GmbH, and Toyota's personal mobility i-unit concept vehicle which transforms into a high-speed for-highway-use vehicle, and Ky Michaelson's rocket powered wheelchair.

Given the present breadth of wheelchair designs and technologies, what would you conclude about the opportunity for innovation in this arena? WheelchairX thinks that this diverse market space is a frontier for innovation, offering humanitarian benefits and business profits. In time, the WheelchairX website will present some of the rationale for this assertion.