Thursday, July 13, 2006

Roll On

I've seen this before on the news and they even have one of them sitting here in the office for awhile. An engineer, several decades earlier on a trip to Morocco, saw a woman crawling along the ground because she was unable to use her legs. The image haunted him until one day he was inspired to try to invent a wheelchair. He found that most people in developing nations couldn't afford wheelchairs and often relied on donated (often used) wheelchairs from wealthier countries, and that the estimates were that less than 100,000 wheelchairs had ever been given away and that there was a need for more than 100,000,000. (For the remainder, they either have to scoot along the ground or rely on family to carry them places.)

He set about to build a new wheelchair. While it wouldn't be approved by the FDA in this country, it's really good at solving a need, inexpensively, using mass-produced items in a kit that's also inexpensive to ship. Pretty cool. Click here to learn more.

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