This is another feel-good story for me, with the Ogo wheelchair. Getting around is difficult for people who are physically disabled and this NZ engineer has taken a basic Segway device (made for totally-able people) and made it into something really useful. There’s a news item from NZ here and Kevin Halsall has a website at http://ogotechnology.com/ that really doesn’t tell you much. There’s a bit more on YouTube here.
Whereas I haven’t really seen much of a purpose to the Segway-like personal conveyances, and they are more likely to lead to a lack of exercise and thus health problems, this puts a whole new slant on the idea which I hadn’t thought of. The cost is however likely to be a bit high with the donor machine costing in the region of $10k. Sad that, but I’m sure I could cost it down a lot (that used to be my job, after all).
On the wheelchair theme I also noticed this, where another inventor has added deployable tank-tracks to a wheelchair to enable it to climb stairs safely. It’s possible that the two ideas could be combined too, to enable those wheelchair-bound people to get around more easily and, maybe more importantly, to make them independent and feel useful in society rather than always needing help. They have a website at http://scalevo.ch/ for more information if you want to get one.
Although neither of these are a technological breakthrough, it’s using what we have already got to get over real problems. It’s nice to see these being manufactured.
One other nice development I’ve seen around is the idea of fitting the designers up with stiff weighted suits and gloves, sound-damping headphones, and goggles that fuzz and darken things a bit, so they can personally understand what it’s like for older people to use their flashy new designs. When I started programming computers I had a 7″ screen and could see to solder small bits. These days I need a much bigger screen and solder the even-smaller bits of today under magnification. I expect that we’ll start to see some designs coming out that aren’t only easy for the young to use – we all lose a bit year by year after the peak years, after all. On the theme of independence this observation fits in nicely, since it looks like the proportion of old people will keep rising and putting them (OK, us…) out to grass isn’t the best use of that accumulated experience.
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