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Comment by loloquwowndueo | Hacker News Reader

I just checked online and wheelchairs here (Canada) can be had for about US $500. What am I missing in this $1K “affordable” wheelchair idea?

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Are you looking at "hospital" style wheelchairs, or dedicated use wheelchairs? The difference is huge. Those hospital style, one size fits all chairs are HEAVY, clunky, slow, and tire you out very easily if you don't have someone pushing you. Someone with a spinal cord injury or a variety of mobility constrants would be better off in a dedicated chair like this as they are lighter (sub 20lbs), designed to fit to the user, and offer more comfort which combats things like skin wounds.

If you look at wheelchairs from companies like TiLite or Quickie, you are starting off at almost double this price before any customization (rims, guards, etc). $1000 all in for a dedicated wheelchair is fantastic.

The weight of a bike or a wheelchair matters a lot less when you're at low speeds on level terrain without many turns, which describes a hospital to a T - they have to be able to get gurneys through these spaces, and if you think a wheelchair is heavy then brother have I got news for you.

But the moment you go outside now you're dealing with ramps and hills.

I'm 38, more fit than most, I had to interact with my father-in-law's wheelchair this weekend for the first time. He is 73 and expected to travel with it everywhere, lifting it in and out of some kind of a vehicle. I would _very_ much describe it as heavy, especially in the context of a 70+ (maybe 60+, maybe 50+) year old individual. I'm wondering what the news is.

> What am I missing in this $1K “affordable” wheelchair idea?

Truckloads of paperwork, at least in the EU. Wheelchairs are regulated as "medical devices" since 2017, which does make sense given that people tend to spend a large portion of their day sitting in them and that they tend to be on the upper end of the body weight distribution... but the certifications make them much more expensive than they'd need to be, and they also prevent competition from entering the market.

Additionally, laws of scale apply here as well. Wheelchairs are a pretty bespoke, small scale industry - outside of large orders from civil protection agencies to be used in mass evacuation scenarios (the German THW and Red Cross for example have stockpiles, mostly used in foreign aid/crisis response and WW2-era bomb evacuations), every user has their own specific needs, making mass production all but infeasible.

From the article:

> When I first heard about this, it sounded awesome and a bit far-fetched. It’s hard to find a pair of quality wheelchair wheels for less than $500. Same with a rigid backrest. How were they going to offer both, plus a custom wheelchair frame without compromising on quality?

I have no idea though. Maybe there are sort of like… different classes of wheelchair, and they are trying to make not-terrible one? Like technically $5 headphones exist but not from a hobbyist point of view.

You can get perfectly viable inexpensive bicycles as well - but if you were expecting to replace ALL of your other vehicle transport with a bike would you start by looking at ones with welded steel frames? The classic 80s Schwinn 10-speed that weighs in at 40 pounds but is pretty indestructible?

That's a $500 wheelchair.

$500 buys you a decent enough but hardly "happy to live with" indoor chair. Not the kind of chair that you go shopping in.

Insurance approved I think is the key differentiator.

the article isn't super clear, but it didn't sound like the goal for the $1000 wheelchair was for it to be insurance approved.

Insurance only pays for one chair every 8 years (IIRC, my aunt who was in a wheelchair died a few years back and so now I no longer have family conversations about these details). The ability to get custom chairs for different purposes would be nice. My aunt had an off road wheelchair for using around the yard, back when she could walk around the house (with a cane), but the doctor warned her she would be full time in a wheelchair around the house before the next time insurance would buy her one. So if you can get the expensive wheel chair for around the yard and afford to buy without insurance a second better suited for around the house that would be useful.

In the middle of the article they say that an insurance-approved wheelchair will tend to cost the patient $1000 after insurance. They're aiming for private purchase at the same price.

Most of them are under $200 in Amazon

Would you buy an under-$200 bike off of Amazon? Especially one you spent all day on?

I don't know about Amazon, but $200 is the price of a reasonable entry-level bike in any large surface store so yes?

I know this is HN and people will likely look down on anyone riding a <$2000 bike, but come on.

I ride a lot, and am happy to ride cheap bikes, but I probably wouldn't ride a $200 Amazon or Walmart bike for rides longer than 30-40 miles without swapping the saddle, which would add anywhere from $40 to $150.

The question was would you spend that on a device you spend 8+hrs in each day, which is something people often ignore.

This is a device you _live_ in. This is someone's mobility and independence you're talking about. Not a "I spend 30 minutes to an hour a day riding", or a "I commute to work on this" but instead "I use this to enjoy life".

Most people don't ride their bike every single day, sometimes for 8-12 hours per day.

If you did, you probably wouldn't be particularly happy with a $200 bike.

$200 is a reasonable price for a bicycle-shaped garage decoration which gets ridden for 30 minutes per month, which is indeed all that many people want out of a bicycle. Something practical for a 15 minute one-way commute that you ride every day is more like $500 new. Something which you could spend all day every day on would be a lot more.

When our kids were growing quickly, we went through a number of sub-$300 bikes, both new and gifted by family. I ended up doing about one repair every two weeks, including broken derailleurs, junky brakes, jammed wheels, you name it. And our kids did not abuse those bikes.

I ended up buying a bike stand and a basic toolkit just so I could fix those bikes quickly and get the kids back outside. The parts on those bikes were absolute garbage and the reliability was zero.

Meanwhile I have a medium/high-end mountain bike from 1997 that still has some original parts on it, despite having seen time as a daily commuter and a trail bike.

A good thing to look at is resale value. Around here, you can resell a $1200 mountain bike for a good price. But you'd lucky to get much for a $800 bike.

Most bicycles these days are in the $6-7k range easily. I mean you can cycle with a cheap-o but what about your wheels, your lack of suspension? Your brakes? The feeling of a premium amazing handling MTB is something else.

No, there are much better under-$200 bikes on craigslist. :P Get a nice $100 bike from the early 80s and pay a bike store for a tuneup, and you've got a pretty useful bike to ride on all day; gotta friction shift though. Not a lot of great looking wheelchairs on craigslist near me though.

There are many different classes of wheelchair. Most of the really cheap versions are medical chairs for people who can't move on their own for whatever reason, think the kind you see at hospitals or nursing homes for wheeling people around. This type is for people who can't walk but can still sit upright on their own and can move the wheelchair on their own. They're lighter, rigid and have higher efficiency than the medical type. They're also semi custom or adjustable to fit the user better than the temp/medical kind.

Smart phone under $200, would you want one?

Go to someone who doesn’t know anything about smartphones and he’ll say sure hit me up.

That’s me, I know nothing about wheelchairs, hence why I’m asking.

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