The Challenge 

Imagine one of your loved ones being in a nursing home. Every time you visit them, you take them for a walk in their wheelchair in the hope of satisfying two of their greatest desires at the same time; socializing with you and being outside the nursing home for a while. Sadly, after each visit, you have the feeling that something was missing in the social interaction you had with them and that your conversations remained quite shallow… After some time, you start to see what is causing this. As a consequence of your loved one being in a wheelchair, nonverbal communication is impossible during a walk; since you cannot look each other into the eyes you cannot see, experience, and react to each other’s emotions. Besides that, when you cannot speak towards each other, also verbal communication can be difficult if your loved one isn’t able to speak that clearly/loud anymore or is bad hearing. As a result, we unfortunately see way too often that something that should be a great social activity full of emotional interaction is reduced to the level of a very noisy phone call for those that are in need of heaving this interaction the most. Since there is not yet a solution for this problem on the market, we gave ourselves the mission to develop a system that allows wheelchair users to fully open up all possibilities for social interaction during a walk.

The Solution

In our vision, the optimal solution for this problem is a wheelchair accessory that allows anyone to transform almost any manual wheelchair into a hybrid wheelchair, being defined as a wheelchair that can be reversed in a matter of seconds. When reversed, the wheelchair can be pushed from the front, which makes it possible to look into each other’s eyes during a walk. This opens up the possibility of having non-verbal communication and makes verbal communication easier. The 4-minute video below contains a short demonstration of our latest prototype from 2:34. Besides that, it also elaborates on the specific case that motivated us to start this project, states the main design requirements that such a product should satisfy, and tells a little bit about our first user experiences. In case you want to know more about the project or want to contribute to bringing this product to the market, you can also reach out to us directly via wouter@phaestus-pd.nl

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