Executive Summary : | WHO estimates 1% of any population could benefit from a wheelchair. Through extensive field visits and interviews with experts, we found many people with loco-motor disability do not come out of their houses. The reason for this was their mobility device. Wheelchairs function well indoors but are severely restrictive outdoors. More than 1.2 Lac such wheelchair are distributed every year. On the other hand, tricycle / tri-scooter functions well outdoors but is unusable indoors. Further, people cannot transfer independently or find great difficulty in transferring from one device to another and eventually only use wheelchair, remaining indoors. The objective of the project is to provide a complete mobility solution by combining the benefits of both wheelchair and tricycle, and proposes a novel add-on solution which converts a wheelchair into a tricycle providing the users both indoor and outdoor mobility in the same device. |
Co-PI: | Prof Vivek Sarda, Department, Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Chennai, Prof Swostik Sourav Dash, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Chennai |