A New, Off-Road Wheelchair For the Developing World

According to the U.S. Agency For International Development, around the world, over 20 million people need wheelchairs. Unfortunately, a huge percentage of those people -- 70% by one estimate -- live in rural areas where traditional wheelchairs just don't really work.

Enter the Leveraged Freedom Chair, a wheelchair prototype that could revolutionize rural mobility.

The Leveraged Freedom Chair looks like a regular mechanical wheelchair on steroids. The main innovation is that the LFC has a gear system modified from a bicycle. In the same way that a mountain biker can switch gears based on the terrain, the LFC gives its users more gear options, which can allow them to power through terrain that would otherwise stop a normal wheelchair. (What's more, the gears are easily switched by simply modifying the hand's position on the levers.) In addition to the gear system, the LFC also adds a third front wheel, in part to offer greater stability on rough terrain.

One of the most important aspects of the project is that basically all of its needed parts are also used to make bicycles. That means local assembly, customization, repair, etc. aren't out of reach for communities. There is no proprietary secret sauce other than the assembly of the parts. This gives the LFC project the ability to meet the full need that's out there, not just scaling a single company.

The project has also been lauded for its smart rollout. The project lead, Amos Winter -- an MIT PhD candidate in mechanical engineering -- has been working on this topic of mobility for years. In 2007, he founded the MIT Mobility Lab to give students the chance to collaborate with local manufacturers around the world on mobility issues. The earliest concepts for the LFC came from a design competition in 2008, and Winter has recently field-tested the first few prototypes, with great success. He's now working on tweaking the design and hopes to soon begin large-scale production, which would give local manufacturers the tools to produce 500-1,000 unites per month.

I think the project is a great reminder about how many quiet innovators there are working on the problems that don't make the cover of Time and Newsweek. The more that we can recognize and connect these types of innovators across networks, the more successful our efforts for widespread social change will be.

Photo credit: MIT Mobility Lab