Special wheelchair gets users standing and climbing stairs

echo64 , 9 months ago

Whilst this is cute and really only a university research project. It’s always worth remembering there is a long history of tech companies coming in with their new wheelchairs with special features that are unmaintainable and unrepariable as soon as the startup failed which is usually pretty quickly.

Markimus , 9 months ago

This is not a new technology, I’m not sure how practical this is at the moment given how heavy / bulky it is compared to how it would be otherwise, as well as how expensive the technology is.

The transforming wheels technology looks promising though, that could fundamentally change everything; whether it works in practice is really whether the wheels are load-bearing or not.

Markimus , 9 months ago

Instead of transforming wheels, when are we going to move to some sort of AI-driven robot legs attached to a chair? Evolution has already solved this problem.

jordanlund , 9 months ago

Wasn’t this one of those things Dean (Segway) Kamen invented like 30 years ago?

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBOT

“first working prototype was available in 1992”