Are the powertrains and control systems in power wheelchairs really that specialised? Or is it another case of the medical device markup and regulatory hurdles driving up costs?
I ended up adding a long range remote control to it. A remote control power chair is fun to drive around. People do get a little concerned when they see a chair rolling around without a driver
This makes me actually appreciate reliability in e-vehicles motor cutoffs etc. I keep thinking if this could have been avoided with a better quality e-bike or if actually it would be even worst with a cheaper one.
Which makes one think, how often a wheelchair with cheap e-scooter parts would crash people into staris, cars etc
It's these little things that get you. The scooters all have some kind of debounce logic, disabling the accelerator until you're moving sufficiently fast - but the logic doesn't kick in when you stop without releasing the lever. A little bit of redundancy would've helped here.
He sort of knew, but didn't expect it, that when the roll of the device exceeds a certain threshold, the device will shutdown. Even if you're on a curve going with some speed. Broke his wrist. Since then he's also wearing wrist protectors that keep the hand straight.
Actually it was a bit unexpected that it would have known to do that; it must have used its complete IMU data to even know it was rolled, as plain accelerometer would have been pointing "down" as usual.
Those e-unicycles terrify me. No way I'd trust my life to one. Once you're at speed, every failure mode results in instant passenger ejection. I see people flying through traffic on those things - they're just one sensor glitch or integer overflow away from serious injury.
That actually feels like overengineering based on well-intentioned, but wrong specs. You probably want to just use sideways acceleration for "falling over" detection, instead of roll.
Add a hat and a scarf on a wire and you've got a Halloween prop.
However, as you have pointed out, since it is also a market where people have few choices, there is no incentive for any new player to significantly lower the prices. Even if they easily could. Because they know that they will get the customers anyway.
That seems to be the root cause of the excessive price problem. An existing oligopoly of rent-seeking companies. Or a cartel, if you like.
I think that one of the ways to disturb this market and bring the prices down is for some honest company to join it and price their products fairly.
Once there is one such company, I assume that everyone else will lower their prices as well. Because otherwise they will run out of business.
Now i learn from you that that low quality device is so bad that you consider it a separate product class in itself. Can you tell us more what does it lack? In other words what features are you looking for when you are looking for a 40-cell brail display? (What is the minimum quality for it to be a “car” in your analogy?)
I’ve long thought that open source would make a lot of sense for assistive devices, and that it has the potential to change incentives within the cartel of assistive device manufacturing.
That would be interesting to know if his solution could match the 4k$ in term of usability or if there is some issue like refreshing rate that make the piezo based system necessary for a good user experience.
That said, a quick google says there's 65-132 million wheelchair users worldwide so it's not a small market either.