Page 10 - Mobility Management, May/June 2021

ATP Series
What will it take to change the conversation about power assist?
Power assist has long been considered an intervention to call on once damage has been done, after manual wheelchair users have strained and stressed shoulders, arms, wrists, and hands after years of self-propelling. Power assist, as past thinking goes, is for middle age. Or it’s for college campuses, Disney World, and extraordinary adven-
tures. And certainly, it can be.
But can power assist be more?
POWER-ASSIST APPLICATIONS CLOSER TO HOME
Curtis Merring, OTR, MOT, is Director of Product Marketing for
Permobil Americas. While power-assist
devices are often equated with
really is opening up more functional activities across the board.” In fact, Merring said, there are plenty of power-assist applica-
tions much closer to home.
For example: “If someone lives on a hill, and they just want to
carry their groceries from the bottom of the driveway to the top of the driveway. Another example is people who are foot propel-
lers, traditionally people with hemiplegia, whether that’s from stroke or CP [cerebral palsy]. Maybe they are
in their home, but they can’t get over a threshold. They can’t go from linoleum to carpet. Now they
hit a little [power-assist] boost on their button on the side of their chair, and they get over that threshold.”
POWER ASSIST’S RIPPLE EFFECT
But power assist’s value goes beyond just getting a wheelchair user from point A to point
B more efficiently. Merring pointed out that when consumers use power assist throughout the day,
they’re conserving energy that can then be used on other activi- ties of daily living.
wide-open spaces such as shopping malls or airports, Merring
sees plenty of other applications.
“Power assist is not just for active people,” he said. “It
“I can’t really stop the number of times someone needs to transfer,” Merring pointed out. “They need to go POWER to the toilet, they need to go to their bed, they
MOVE
By Laurie Watanabe
need to go to their chair. I can’t really change the
RETHINKING THE MANY PROACTIVE POSSIBILITIES FOR POWER ASSIST
MAN IN WHEELCHAIR: ISTOCKPHOTO.COM/NATASHAFEDOROVA