A Revolutionary New Wheelchair On The Horizon
27 Jul 2007
Correspondent John Hockenberry on MSNBC's "Dateline" recently presented the most exciting development in mobility technology in years. It was hard to believe your eyes when you saw what was happening on the screen.
This was a story about an inventor and an invention that will truly make a difference for thousands of disabled persons.
An article posted online at The Spinal Cord Injury Research Center explains what is less than 2 years from being commercially available on the marketplace. Excerpts from the article follow:
We have the know-how to fly to the moon, but most people who can't walk still get around with what's essentially 200-year-old technology the wheelchair. One inventor has decided it's time to get wheelchair riders rolling into the 21st century. He says his machine can take you just about anywhere you want to go. He's been keeping his top secret invention under wraps until now.
Wheelchairs can get you around, but they don't get close enough to the places disabled people might like to go. You've heard the expression "confined to a wheelchair?" Well actually, if you think about it, it's the wheelchairs that are confined to the relatively few smooth, easy-rolling places in the world. But what if somebody came up with a device that, as they say, could go where no wheelchairs have gone before? ........
He's one of this nation's most prestigious inventors. He's a sort of Thomas Edison in the medical world. Among Kamen's inventions is a portable kidney dialysis machine. His early ideas made him millions, but money is not what drives Dean Kamen. "I don't work on a project unless I believe that it will dramatically improve life for a bunch of people,"says Kamen.
Nine years ago Kamen wanted to improve the life of a young man he happened to see struggling to get his wheelchair up a curb. "I just fixated on how unreasonable that condition really is," he says. "And it just seemed to me that the fundamental issue was the world has not been architected for people that are sitting down at 39 inches."
Kamen thought about this old problem in a revolutionary new way. What if instead of getting a chair that could go upstairs, you could make a machine that could stand up and balance the way humans do? "Your mother remembers your first steps. It's a big deal that humans walk erect," says Kamen. "It's difficult to do. But once we've learned to do it, we're capable of dealing with curbs and a world with stairs
Kamen and his engineers came up with a two-wheeled balancing prototype that worked and became a top-secret patented invention crammed full of sophisticated gyroscopes, electric motors and computers. Kamen allowed "Dateline" an exclusive peek at it. To our surprise, Kamen's machine was actually more compact and narrower than a traditional wheelchair.....
More information and the complete article is available online at The Spinal Cord Injury Research Center.
