Page 19 - Mobility Management, January/February 2021

bulky — and vowing to design a better one. In a press conference following Phoenix Instinct’s win, Slorance described the Phoenix i as “taking the proven and updating it with smart technology.”
In a news announcement from Toyota, Slorance added, “Winning the Toyota Mobility Unlimited Challenge is incredible for Phoenix Instinct and for wheelchair users. The wheelchair as we know it has been technologi-
cally unchanged for decades. The funding we received allowed us to prove smart technology makes for an easier-to-use and safer wheelchair with the potential for a suite of new features.”
The Human Engineering Research Laboratories (HERL) at the University of Pittsburgh provided technical advice to Mobility Unlimited Challenge competitors and also hosted the judging panelists, who hailed from Australia, Brazil, Germany, Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Slorance said he expects the Phoenix i wheelchair
to be ready for production in 18 to 24 months. One of Phoenix Instinct’s priorities, at least at this early stage, is to deliver a chair that’s comparable in price to existing ultralightweight wheelchairs. m
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A New Design Tackles an Old Problem
A recent example of innovative thinking solving an old problem is Ki Mobility’s design approach to wheelchair vibration.
Tom Whelan, VP of Sales, explained upgrading an existing product vs. designing a new one: “A large part of development in our industry is not brand new. In rigid wheelchairs, I’d say it’s mostly incremental improvement. You can carve out some exceptions: For example, the introduction of monotube frame design.
“Most wheelchairs are improvements on existing designs, so the priorities on those projects are pretty simple. You’re focused on feedback from your customers, taking all the information you have, and applying that to improving an existing product.”
Ki Mobility’s Ethos ultralight, however, has an entirely different design and perspective.
“We started with a problem and an idea,” Whelan said. “The market kept talking about vibration. People kept marketing chairs based on vibration, whether it was titanium or composites, and they were all focusing in on the frame material of the chair.
“Alan [Ludovici, a Ki engineer] and I had been talking about this for a couple of years. We decided to see how we could change the design to solve the problem. That’s where Alan and I came up [with] discon- necting the casters and separating the seat frame and the base frame