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Aug. 30, 2005 Temporarily Invalid Exposure to different aspects of our world comes from adversity. My wife lost her second pregnancy early in the first trimester. During her current pregnancy she started bleeding in the fifth week. The seventh week of her pregnancy aligned with a pre-planned vacation to Cape May, New Jersey. The bleeding lasted for less than a whole day, but the end result was that my wife was put on modified bed rest for the duration of our vacation. The vacation could still happen but she was no longer allowed to pick up our son, no longer allowed to carry him and needed to be in a wheelchair for any amount of walking outside of the house we rented. If any of you have been to Cape May, New Jersey you understand that it is a relaxing vacation where you do a lot of walking. Previous Opinion regarding Handicapped Access Perhaps in the past I may have been one of those people that said, “Handicapped access, well ok – some ramps, handicapped spots and hey they are good to go.” I know now that this is totally untrue. Even the simplest part of my premise – that wheelchairs are effective – is false. Everyone gets old. I will get old. There may come a time after my 34th year of life that I will need a wheelchair to get around. I now view such a possibility in acknowledgement that getting around solely on a wheelchair is difficult at best and that such a life will not be satisfactory on top of whatever ailment that may make me wheelchair bound. Choices We were given two choices for wheelchair rental: Four small wheels or two small wheels and two large wheels (traditional). The rental location advised us that the four small wheeled wheelchairs are lighter and easier to maneuver. In addition, my wife and her female relatives can be very stubborn about being self-sufficient and the large wheeled wheelchair would giver he the opportunity to try and wheel herself around. This activity was specifically forbidden by our doctor since it involves using a lot of abdominal muscle to perform the motion. This is exactly the kind of activity that we were being warned against. Power wheelchairs and mobility scooters were out of the question for economic reasons and also because we’d already rented one for my father-in-law for the vacation. Spending over $1000 on power wheelchairs or mobility scooters is just not my idea of wisely spent money. Short notice also made it improbable that we would have had an easy time finding a power wheelchair or mobility scooter. I’m a moderately healthy thirty-four year old male and pushing my wife around on a wheelchair for a week didn’t disturb me much. At least I got to push her around for once. Design Forty years ago the wheelchair we rented might have been the best that technology can offer. Today this wheelchair is poorly designed, cumbersome, inconvenient and in some cases dangerous. Inconvenience is explicit in wheelchairs in several facets. No cup-holder for passenger or pusher. The temperatures during our vacation never went below the high seventies during the day and sometimes broke the nineties. Having an adequate water supply is necessary in hot weather conditions and impossible to maintain in a wheelchair unless you stop every half-hour to buy a drink. This isn’t a really an acceptable solution unless you are the vendors at Cape May who of course charge a premium for drinks. There is no place that is designed to store anything. This is no way to adjust the rider’s seat height. Cumbersome comes from handles that are at a fixed height. There is no way to adjust the position or height of the pushing handles. Definitively, you cannot push a wheelchair with one hand if you wanted to take a drink while pushing the rider. The handles are poorly designed. The handles are part of the frame of steel tubing and are covered by the hardest plastic known to humankind. The handles guarantee that every bump in the road is translated to the pusher. The hardness of the handles increases the speed at which the pusher fatigues. This all makes it less likely for a person in need of a wheelchair to actually ask someone to help them out and push them around town. There was no question that I would and did push my wife in this wheelchair from the rented house and the entire length of the promenade and back several times. It certainly wasn’t fun. Certain things make riding a bicycle enjoyable to a young person even on the fifteenth time around the block. Some of that enjoyment is derived from the differences in the sidewalks surface, the gaps and unevenness basically the small ramps and bumps that turn a flat piece of sidewalk from a featureless plain to a place with many different variations. These same features that made sidewalks fun for a bicycles make wheelchairs often difficult to maneuver. Larger cracks even when encountered straight-on nearly caused the wheelchair, wife and I to collapse in a heap. Changes in level on driveway openings nearly caused the wheelchair to crash. This is primarily due to a design ‘feature’ that the only suspension the wheelchair has is solid rubber wheels and a fixed axle. There were certainly difficulties involving judgment – will this gap in the sidewalk cause the wheelchair to stop abruptly or not? Do I need to use the pegs and lift the front wheels up? Perhaps experience would provide much enlightenment in regard to these questions, but the reality is that a much more effective design would make these kinds of judgment calls to occur less often. Fundamentally, the wheels on the wheelchair will work excellent in an indoor mall. Cheap bicycles, expensive strollers, remote controlled cars and die-cast 1:18 model cars have shock absorbers in their suspension system. Air-filled tires are not that difficult to maintain. A slight alteration in the wheelchair’s design and there could be shock absorbers that would provide a smoother ride to the rider and a more controllable ride for the pusher. A better suspension would also provide a greater range of usability for the wheelchair users. This would also increase the amount of time before fatigue forces the wheelchair pusher to take a break. A major restriction of the wheelchair is where it can be used. Cape May is partially known for its beaches. Unfortunately I was unable to find a way to get my wife to the beach. This is because the thin wheels on the wheelchair offer no traction on the beach sands. This would not have been a problem if the wheels on the wheelchair could be removed and replaced with wheels more suited to the terrain to be traveled upon. Why is it that the disabled cannot enjoy terrains other than the artificial? It is like they have been ‘partially’ enabled by wheelchairs. Searching the internet you can find wheelchairs made for the beach which I found to be cost prohibitive. Certainly they were not made available to me for the duration of my vacation. There are many different terrains on Earth and simply speaking they are not available to you if you are confined to a wheelchair. Lightweight The primary reason we rented the four-small-wheeled wheelchair was the weight; however, both models are made of steel tubing. Steel tubing is certainly strong and the best material if you are expecting impacts, but carbon fiber is far superior by weight and strength. Certainly aluminum would be a good choice as well and could cut the weight of a wheelchair by as much as thirty percent. There is no way to determine why these materials are not used in wheelchair crafting. What can be said is that in the present there are strollers that are sub-five pounds and bicycles can weigh as little as 14 pounds. The lightest wheelchair I could locate was 15 pounds, but most weigh much more. The wheelchair that I rented was probably upwards of 30 pounds. NOTE: Talk about things that can be done to improve wheelchairs How Can Wheelchairs Be Improved Wheelchairs can be improved in many ways. Similar to spacecraft it is unlikely that you will be able to create a wheelchair that does everything appropriately everywhere. In general wheelchairs should all be made as light as possible for their particular function. Wheelchairs should be built modularly in regard to wheels. People should within limitations be able to change out wheels to work in different terrains. It should not be an off-road wheelchair, a beach wheelchair and most wheelchairs are good for smooth surfaces and each one costing a few thousand a piece. Almost all wheelchairs should have an active suspension system including air-filled tires, shock absorbing system and a frame that gives with bumps. Handles on all wheelchairs should be designed to aid the pusher and extend pushing capability to longer times by reducing fatigue on the wheelchair pusher. Cup-holders for passenger and pusher should be options that are easily available either from the manufacturer or through third parties. The pusher should be able to push the wheelchair on a level surface with one hand so they can consume water when necessary without stopping. Extra padding should be available to make the ride comfortable. Wheelchair manufacturers should encourage third-party companies to come out with accessories to enable the wheelchair rider. The option on some wheelchairs should be available for the pusher to pull the wheelchair like a rickshaw instead of traditional wheelchair configuration. In some ways it appears unlikely that the typical wheelchair manufacturer will advance much in any of the changes necessary to make wheelchair users differently-able instead of less-able and truthfully for some time to come wheelchair users will still be less-able but the disparity in abilities can be reduced more than the present state. The organizations to speak out and encourage building a better wheelchair are the high schools, colleges and universities. A new wheelchair design could be part of a class project. The different minds focused on a problem can often come out with better solutions than entrenched companies that in some cases have no motivation and little competition to encourage innovation.
There should be a huge outcry about the difficulties involved with
wheelchairs, but I do not normally hear anything about it. It could be
that
I have a sheltered life. Clearly there are deficiencies in regard to
wheelchairs and their capabilities. The problem is there to be solved
and
having technology it should be solved.
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