
IDEA/LIGHTBULB: DEPOSITPHOTO.COM/BRIANAJACKSON
Manufacturers, regardless of what they make, design products based on what their customers
tell them. Complex Rehab Technology (CRT)
manufacturers want to be responsive to the
consumers, clinicians, and suppliers who use,
recommend, purchase and fit their products.
But CRT is complicated. Each person who uses
a wheelchair has different goals, functional abilities,
clinical needs, and progressions of conditions.
End user success is the goal, but many answers
come from outside the wheelchair industry.
Such is the case with ultralightweight chairs,
expected to perform at such high levels while
staying so minimal.
Pushing Design Envelopes
Cody Verrett, VP of Sales for Motion Composites,
spoke of consumers’ expectations for the
company to excel. “We spend a great deal of time
listening to customer feedback, and we push the
envelope with our engineering and quality teams
to the benefit of the client,” he said. “We fully
appreciate that you have to design with reimbursement
in mind, but we believe that whenever
we’re in a position to lower overall weight,
increase quality or improve propulsion efficiency,
that’s the direction we want to go.
“That’s one of the things I love most about
working with Motion Composites. They’re really
proud to be the lightest fully adjustable K0005
in each category, and we’re always applying our
patented technologies that increase propulsion
efficiency across the entire product line, from
top to bottom. So everything we do is about
lowering weight and increasing the rigidity of
the folding frame, and of course, our [rigid]
Apex as well. That’s where we spend all of our
time, in those two areas, because they make
such a difference to the consumer.”
Motion Composites has held a different
perspective from the beginning. In an industry
that typically holds up rigid-framed ultralights
as the gold standard, Motion Composites first
set its sights on designing the best folding-frame
chair possible.
“They came to this challenge with no previous
experience, not being part of the wheelchair
industry,” Verrett said of company co-founders
Eric Simoneau and David Gingras, who
currently serve as CEO and COO, respectively.“They came from an outsider’s perspective of trying to revolutionize
manual wheelchairs as we know it.”
The Quebec-based manufacturer specializes in carbon fiber.
“One of the things I’ve learned is Motion Composites starts with
the very best,” Verrett said. “For example, our best ideas in folding
wheelchairs reside in our Helio C2, and that product is to me the
greatest folding wheelchair on earth. It’s incredible for what it
does, how strong it is. And we’re so confident in our carbon fiber
application that we warranty it: It comes with a lifetime guarantee.”
Motion Composites then applied the Helio C2’s principles to
other wheelchair lines that used less costly materials. “While we
may have moved from a carbon fiber to an aluminum product
to better meet difficult, challenging funding guidelines,” Verrett
explained, “the same technological principles came over from
the premier model in the Helio C2 all the way down through
our Helio A7, then eventually to our Helio A6, which is our most
entry-level folding chair. But it shares that same one-piece side
frame, symmetrical cross brace and other precision technologies
that make it one of the most rigid, propulsion-efficient and
lightest aluminum folding wheelchairs on earth.”
Simoneau and Gingras were college students when the idea for
Motion Composites took shape. “They saw folding as the biggest
opportunity to make incredible improvements,” Verrett said of
their decision to focus on a folding-frame wheelchair. “If you
took a folding wheelchair 15 years ago and looked at it, generally
speaking, they had lots of shortcomings. Since E&J [Everest & Jennings] invented the crossbrace folder in the ’50s, it hasn’t
changed, really. Motion Composites saw that as the opportunity
to make something that was just remarkable. [In Canada], folding
is a much more common and a [larger] part of the prescription
process. So it was more prevalent, and they saw it as the biggest
opportunity to make a significant improvement.”
The company looks to the aerospace industry, Verrett said, “for
new and cutting-edge materials, technologies, and application
best practices. However, Motion Composites has sought to be
a trend setter in the industry with our proprietary application
of carbon fiber, our patented symmetrical cross-brace, and the
triple-butted aluminum applications we deploy for strength that’s
incredibly light, just to name a few.”
As far as what he’s looking forward to in the ultralight space,
Verrett said, “I really enjoyed… the Toyota Mobility Foundation’s
Mobility Unlimited Challenge award (see sidebar). It’s in that
spirit of innovation for the benefit of others that I find my true
love for this industry, and it’s why I’m so excited about the direction
Motion Composites is going. We believe the sky’s the limit
with regards to better materials and technologies, and the vibration-damping properties found in our carbon fiber creates the
type of ride characteristics I think all wheelchairs should have.
“I think we will eventually solve the challenge of an ultralightweight
tilt system that takes ‘family-friendly’ to a whole new level.
In the meantime, we are laser focused on anything we can do to
make our products weigh less and be more propulsion efficient.”
A New Design Tackles an Old Problem
A recent example of innovative thinking solving an old problem is Ki
Mobility’s design approach to wheelchair vibration.
Tom Whelan, VP of Sales, explained upgrading an existing product
vs. designing a new one: “A large part of development in our industry
is not brand new. In rigid wheelchairs, I’d say it’s mostly incremental
improvement. You can carve out some exceptions: For example, the
introduction of monotube frame design.
“Most wheelchairs are improvements on existing designs, so the
priorities on those projects are pretty simple. You’re focused on feedback
from your customers, taking all the information you have, and applying
that to improving an existing product.”
Ki Mobility’s Ethos ultralight, however, has an entirely different
design and perspective.
“We started with a problem and an idea,” Whelan said. “The market
kept talking about vibration. People kept marketing chairs based on
vibration, whether it was titanium or composites, and they were all
focusing in on the frame material of the chair.
“Alan [Ludovici, a Ki engineer] and I had been talking about this for
a couple of years. We decided to see how we could change the design
to solve the problem. That’s where Alan and I came up [with] disconnecting
the casters and separating the seat frame and the base frame with elastomers.”
Whelan noted that using elastomers to isolate components
“has been done in modern engineering for years. A lot of new
buildings are built on foundations with vibration dampening for
that purpose. The Millennium Bridge in London was launched
and almost collapsed; they had to shut it down until they could
figure out a way to dampen vibration that was causing this resonance
frequency and getting this thing to twist and sway.”
He added, “Really, [Ki’s] design priority was to develop a chair
that could fit into the cost, because cost is important. We didn’t
want to start with something that was unattainable. We knew
what the problem was, and that was the focus of the design.”
The CRT Industry’s Challenges
Due to CRT’s small size, its engineers have to be skilled at
adapting possible solutions they discover in other industries.
“There’s a lot of information on how whole-body vibration
affects able-bodied people,” Whelan said. “There’s no real
research on how whole-body vibration is different in its effect on
people with disabilities.”
Curt Prewitt, MS, PT, ATP, Director of Education for Ki Mobility,
said, “The research that’s out there has been correlating able bodies
and what’s in the ISO standards regarding vibration and humans in
seated postures, and trying to apply it to those seated in a wheelchair.
There are some isolated instances of looking at eliciting spasticity,
for example, but those dots haven’t been connected too well.”
“The solution actually incentivizes the research,” Whelan
added. “After launching Ethos, we were contacted by an ATP who
is doing her dissertation on this subject.”
Out of necessity, Whelan added, inspiration comes from all
over. “Clearly, we’re in a competitive environment, so we pay
very close attention to what everybody does. The U.S. market
is more constrained by reimbursement, but if you go to REHA
[the international rehabilitation tradeshow], you see all of these
variations of design. Most of what I see in wheelchair technology,
as far as advancements in materials and manufacturing methods,
comes from other industries, like bicycles.”
“Nobody went out and said, ‘I’m going to develop a new alloy
for wheelchairs.’ Nobody said, ‘I need to be able to shape metal
in an entirely new way so I can make wheelchairs.’ We’re the
recipient. So the emphasis is staying in touch with how manufacturing
and material science is moving forward.”
How Innovations Support Consumers
Prewitt cautioned that the science of ultralight innovation must keep
consumers’ interests at its core: “The ‘newest, lightest stuff’ is a bit of a misdirection. All this focus on weight is sometimes at the failure to
address the more important issue of setup. From my perspective as
a clinician, we need to understand the most efficient setup. I think
as people have continued to learn more about optimizing setup,
getting better weight distribution, making more efficient component
choices for environment of use, those sorts of things, it has enabled
users who might have previously been confined to other types of
equipment to [choose] something that might be more mobile for
them, easier to propel, easier to transport, etc.”
Jeromy Brown, a Ki Mobility Product Manager, knows all
about optimal chair setup. At 17, he sustained a C5-6 spinal
cord injury, a level of injury that frequently leads to power chair
use. “I was told I would never be able take care of myself again,”
Brown said. “I’m 100 percent independent. I went to college,
traveled the world with the U.S. Wheelchair Rugby team, got
married and had a child. I’m living my life.”
Upon joining Ki, Brown talked with Whelan about improving
how he sat in his ultralight chair. “I said I’ve got to be stable in
this chair because I’ve got a 4-year-old who’s always leaping at
me. I need to stay in my chair, because I don’t have the function
to get off the ground. My brother has children as well around
that same age, and they just gang up on me.”
Now an Ethos user, Brown said, “I wake up, go to work, to the
grocery store and run errands. I get home at the end of the day,
and I’m exhausted. Like most parents, I have a child who just
wants to play. The difference is when I added Ethos to the equation,
I feel like I increased my energy and efficiency.
“With Ethos, I don’t feel all the vibrations caused by pushing on
various surfaces such as roads, sidewalks and curb cuts. [Vibrations]
add up over the day and reduce my energy. That additional energy
at the end of the day allows me to chase my child around or help
my wife do the dishes… it’s invaluable. In addition, I am able to be
more efficient because I have the ability to optimize my chair setup
to maximize propulsion efficiency throughout the life of the chair.”
The ideal ultralight, then, is a combination of inspired engineering
and an expert setup fine-tuned to each user.
“There were long discussions of ‘Do we put him in a power
chair or a manual chair?’” Brown said of his time in rehab. “I was
lucky enough to have a physical therapist who pushed me to be
in a manual chair. Unfortunately, I was put in a giant titanium
chair that I struggled to get around in. Once I got home I wasn’t
able to change the setup of the chair so I could get around. That’s
the nice thing about Ethos: Yes, it’s a performance chair, but if
you put a [person with a] new injury in it and if they get home
and realize it’s not set up to accommodate their needs, they can
make the adjustments needed to get the optimal setup.”