Ultralightweight wheelchairs are known for their
exactitude. Every ounce of weight or every quarter
inch of adjustment can have a big impact when
the engine powering a wheelchair is the human body.

Sunrise Medical’s new Nitrum wheelchair is an evolution
of tried-and-true QUICKIE ultralightweight engineering.
But in other ways, it displays rather revolutionary
improvements for active ultralight users.

Taking Its Place in the QUICKIE Lineup

In explaining the Nitrum’s pedigree, Jesus Ibarra,
Sunrise’s Product Manager/Adult Manual, noted the
brand’s venerable history: “QUICKIE really represents a
long tradition of manual wheelchairs. We’ve got more
than 30 years now: We research, we listen, we always try
to deliver superior-quality products to the market.”

For the rigid Nitrum, Ibarra added, QUICKIE built on
past successes while also expecting Nitrum to set a
higher bar. “We took the best of everything about our
older products, and the voice of the customer, and we
combined them,” Ibarra said. “That’s the Nitrum: lightest
in class, a lot of user innovations like a one-arm fold
mechanism, and a new patented caster mechanism.”

The Nitrum, which will obsolete the QUICKIE Q7 and
QR7, was launched in Europe prior to being launched in
December in the United States.

“The basis of most of these design innovations was
feedback from wheelchair users,” Ibarra noted. “Our
Global Product Management team are both wheelchair
users, so all those little adjustments, those little things
that people say they would like to have, come from
people actually riding these chairs.”

Improving Transportability in Multiple Ways

Inevitably, one of the first questions about any ultralight
chair is transport weight. Nitrum weighs 10.8 lbs., or 9.7
lbs. without wheel locks. The standard configuration
weight, including wheels, is 18.3 lbs.

Ibarra acknowledged that less weight to propel is
always significant, but he also sees weight as important
to the transport process. “If I can save somebody two to
three seconds when folding their chair or removing their
wheels or transferring in and out of their car, that’s just
part of our original intent of improving people’s lives,” he
said. “To come up with even a lighter aluminum solution,
we had to look elsewhere.”

That meant seeking new possibilities from new materials.
“We started with 7000 series [aluminum] and
ShapeLoc technology with the original Q7,” Ibarra said.
“We upgraded a little bit with 7R. But we had to come up
with something totally different for the Nitrum, and that’s
why we dove into the next generation of 7000 series
aluminum. The 7020 series aluminum has given us extra
strength, and that thin wall of aluminum can still give us
the strength that we need for efficient propulsion.”

The Translation to Functionality

For Angie Kiger, M.Ed, CTRS, ATP/SMS, Clinical Strategy & Education Manager for Sunrise Medical, the success of
a new ultralightweight wheelchair comes down to how it
will improve a client’s function.

The customer demographic for Nitrum, Kiger said, is
“your high-end, dialed-in sort of user. Not that a new user
couldn’t use this chair, but this is really for that person
who is super active, super busy, always on the go, and
wants that ultralightweight feel, wants the rigidity of it.”

Among Kiger’s favorite features is Nitrum’s new
one-handed Twist-Lock system: Grab the bar, twist it
to release its position, then fold the backrest down for
transport. “The nice thing about the Twist-Lock is you
can do that with one hand: You literally just twist and
have it fold down,” Kiger said. “And it gives you a nice
robust area to get a good grip on the chair when you’re
doing transfers. Look at the different folding mechanisms
for the back now. It’s really designed so somebody
can easily transfer out of their vehicle a lot faster, a lot
easier, whether you’re using the solid bar foldback or the
Twist-Lock.”

Kiger is also a fan of Nitrum’s patented caster system:
“You can make three different kinds of adjustments, so you can dial it in exactly the way you want it.”

“With this new patented caster mechanism, you now
have easy access to make those casters perpendicular
to the floor to eliminate floaters,” Ibarra said. “The
new design also gives you the option to adjust inward
or outward if necessary. If you want to set up extreme
camber, the caster mechanism would allow you to do
that. And the last thing is height adjustment: You can
move the entire stem either up or down for fine-tuning to
make sure all four points of the wheelchair are level.”

“One of my good friends is known at her high-end
facility as the Quarter-Inch Queen,” Kiger said, “because
to her, a quarter-inch matters — those little things that
you can do to get those casters set up just right.”

Visualizing Clients in a Nitrum

While the Twist-Lock back, caster adjustment options,
and new LED lights embedded in the frame are Nitrum’s
most visible features, one of the most helpful from an
assessment perspective is the 3D Visualizer. This online
tool enables consumers, clinicians and ATPs to spec out
a Nitrum and see the effects of their selections.

“I think it’s perfect for current social distancing,” Ibarra
said of the ability to see a configured Nitrum from the
safety of home or home office. Kiger added, “It’s very
educational too, because sometimes people will say, ‘I
want to [sit] at 90°.’ And we can say, ‘Let me show you
what that’s going to look like.’ It is an educational tool for
therapists and the ATP to go over with the end user. They
can literally see how the angles of the lower-extremity
supports change or the frame angle changes or the
bend changes within that tool.”

An Augmented Reality feature can display a newly
configured Nitrum in a consumer’s bedroom or hallway,
giving clients and their seating teams an advance look
at how QUICKIE’s latest ultralight rigid will look at home.

“It’s all about the reliability of our products,” Ibarra said
of Nitrum’s debut. “At the end of the day, if I can [lose] a
couple of pounds, that’s nothing if I don’t have a good-rolling
chair that can pass the enormous amount of
testing we do to make sure we have a quality product.

“As times progress and we continue to learn about
other materials and manufacturing processes, we have
to take that next step about what we can do with our
designs from a wheelchair standpoint.”