Intelligent mobility, international wheelchair

Innovators: Rudy Roy, Ben Sexson, Daniel Oliver, Charles Pyott
Mobility Equation: two bikes + brilliant design + welding skills = all-terrain wheelchairs for the disabled in developing countries

During their senior year at the California Institute of Technology, Rudy Roy and Ben Sexson signed up for professor Ken Pickar’s class Sustainable Engineering for the Developing World. Soon, they found themselves teleconferencing with students and professors at a Guatemalan university, talking wheelchairs. They learned that disabled people in the country face costs of $400 and up, more than twice the national average monthly household income. As a further challenge, standard chairs are no match for Guatemala’s potholed streets, muddy roads and rugged hills. Wielding hacksaws and gas welders, the students cannibalized a pair of old mountain bikes to build an inexpensive, dirt-road-worthy chair. Their easy-to-¬reproduce creation had one more advantage over other wheelchairs shipped to the developing world: “There are bike shops in every country,” says Dan Oliver, who joined the effort as a Caltech engineering undergraduate along with Charles Pyott, a student at the nearby Art Center College of Design. “Take our wheelchair into any shop in the world, and they could fix it.”

Having graduated, the four now run a non-profit organization, Intelligent Mobility International. They are working to squeeze production costs down from $150 to $40 per chair. And they’ve partnered with Transitions, a Guatemalan charity that mainly employs wheelchair-bound workers, to build their chairs. “When I started at Caltech,” Pickar says, “the president at the time said, ‘Ken, some of your students are going to change the world.’ These may be the ones who do it.”

Find more examples of novel engineering solutions applied to improve conditions in the developing world, check out:
http://pr.caltech.edu/periodicals/CaltechNews/articles/v42/greenmatters.html