This revolutionary new wheelchair removes a lot of the stress on the user's shoulders, arms and hands.
Steering a traditional wheelchair to the left or right can be a strenuous, inefficient process, in that you have to brake with one rear wheel while pushing harder on the other. Furthermore, the two front caster wheels on traditional wheelchairs passively swivel like the wheels of a shopping cart. Although they do allow the chair to pivot on the spot, they don't stay firmly pointing in any one direction. This means that if the wheelchair user is trying to move forward along a surface that slopes to one side, for instance, the front wheels will automatically turn to face down that slope. As a result, the user has to continuously counter-steer in order to compensate. It's both frustrating and hard work.
Life would be much easier if the front wheels could be steered like those of a car. It would be even better if the steering system left the user's arms free, so the muscle power of both of them could be used solely for propulsion. Alternatively, one arm could be utilized to move the chair forward while the other could be used to hold a smartphone, coffee cup or something else.
That's where the new wheelchair comes in. It's being developed by Reto Togni and Stefan Villiger, both of whom are research assistants at ETH Zurich’s Laboratory for Movement Biomechanics.
The chair's user is able to tilt its backrest to the left or right simply by leaning their body accordingly. A purely mechanical linkage system responds by turning the front wheels in the corresponding direction, and keeping them from wavering from that orientation. Stopping is still performed in the usual manner, by grabbing and slowing both back wheels.
Togni and Villiger are now getting ready to make their chair a reality via ETH Zurich spinoff company Versive, and hope to have a product on the market by mid-2027.
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