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Comment by LeonM | Hacker News Reader

> since you need both hands free to push the wheels

My niece was born without legs, and only one arm. She has a wheelchair that can be operated with one hand. It has the 2 metal push bars fitted to one side of the chair. The left bar is connected to the left wheel, the right bar to the right wheel. You can grab both with one hand. By moving both at the same time you go straight, or grab one ring to steer. It works really intuitively.

I believe this one-hand option was custom designed for her use-case (which would be about 30 years ago now), but since then many other people that have both arms tried her chair, and immediately contacted the manufacturer to order a chair with the one-hand option. AFAIK the manufacturer now offers the one-hand option on all their chairs.

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This seems like a very logical and cheap thing to include in every wheelchair design... I don't know why they all don't have it!

Other 'obvious' design improvements that seem to be missing:

* Wheel-assist - an electric motor pushes along with you to stop you getting tired arms, but still give you the feeling of direct control you don't get with a typical joystick controlled electric. Little 100 watt brushless motors with controllers are only $3 now, and that would be plenty of assistance for going up ramps.

* Auto brakes - a sensor brakes the wheels whenever a hand isn't touching the rim of the wheel - and that can be a software only feature enabled by the above assistance motor...

Etc... It seems wheelchairs are crazy expensive yet don't have most of the features an undergrad student would build as a 'for fun' project.

The reasons are regulatory, not BoM costs. Getting a new medical device approved is hard, and that becomes much harder when you’ve got electronics that could hurt the user, or leave them stranded.

If I were a wheelchair user, I'd be pissed if my government was putting in place laws that were supposed to protect me, but were in fact making my quality of life worse every day because all innovations that might make my life better were being stifled.

I'm not actually sure wheelchairs are approved as medical devices. Certainly not the same way pacemakers are. A friend of mine recently had her power chair go haywire on her and try to kill her, which sounded like a melted MOSFET from how she described the repair job. The wheelchair company apparently elected not to recall that model because it only happens to 1% of users.

Please name the company.

I have the "wheel-assist" you describe - the Yamaha NaviOne. it works incredibly well, and without it I would need a full power chair since my arms are fragile.

Auto brakes as you describe would be really annoying since it would make the alternate-hand technique impossible, and most wheelchair users stop touching the rims between strokes. (I use the handrim grip favored by quadriplegics because of my arms, so I so keep my hands on the rims at all times, but it's not ideal.)

I agree that disability aids are quite overpriced and lackluster in general, but I love my Yamaha wheels.

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