A wheelchair that can carry you up stairs

The Independence iBOT Mobility System is a wheelchair that allows the user to climb stairs, go over sand, rocks and up and down pavements. It has sometimes been called the balancing wheelchair. iBOT was developed by Dean Kamen and his company Deka. They worked with Johnson & Johnson to create the wheelchair, which was first unveiled on 1999.

The idea came up when Dean saw a man in a wheelchair struggling to get over a pavement. According to the website www.msu.edu, he concluded that “the problem wasn’t ineffective wheelchairs, it was that the world was built for people who could balance”. He dreamt of completely reinventing the wheelchair. And so he built the iBOT which addresses the issue of balance.

“The iBOT’s self-balancing technology allows the user to go up and down staircases, navigate difficult terrain and ‘stand’ at eye level with the ambulatory people around them”, according to Deka.

How does it work?

The iBOT can be converted from a standard chair with four wheels to an elevated chair balanced on only two wheels. The four-wheel drive is to go through rough terrain, slopes and 4-inch pavements. For stair-climbing, two sets of drive wheels rotate to climb up or down, one step at a time.

What about balance?

“The iBOT contains patented iBalance Technology, an integrated combination of sensor and software components and multiple computers that work in conjunction with gyroscopes. Gyroscopes are motion sensors that help maintain balance. When the gyroscopes sense movement, a signal is sent to the computers. The computers receive information from various sources and process that information to maintain stability”, America’s Huey 091 Foundation explains.

Running into difficulties

The wheelchair faced many issues, but the design remained popular enough to carry on. And although it was discontinued in 2009, existing units were available until the end of 2013.

The price was one of the reasons they stopped selling the iBOT. When it left the market its cost was $22,000 (£14,080). Furthermore, according to NBCnews.com in 2009, “only a small fraction of the paralyzed even were candidates because the high-tech chair required, among other things, use of at least one arm and certain upper-body control”.

To use the iBOT, for instance, people must not weigh more than 250 pounds, must have good judgement skills to decide which obstacles should be avoided and have special training. Users needed to pass physical, cognitive and perception tests.

Gone but not forgotten

Whether the disadvantages outweigh the advantages or not, depends on who you talk to. But some users really like their wheelchair, especially for the level of independence they achieve with it. “If I ever had to get out of this chair, I really don’t know if I’d want to live anymore, to be honest with you… Guys in these chairs… we might be disabled now, but then we’d really become disabled”, said Alan T. Brown to the NBCnews.

Since 2010, America’s Huey 091 Foundation, an organization that provides advanced mobility devices to wounded disabled veterans, has made it its goal to save the iBOT. On their webpage the Foundation defines its objective as follows - “Our goal is to employ a workforce of military veterans to build, distribute and maintain new iBOTS”.

The potential of the iBOT is arguably life changing, and its enduring popularity, despite it being very much in limbo, is very telling. But it feels like the iBOT has still a long way to go if it is to resurrect itself. Its biggest challenges are probably winning the trust of its potential users, but also, somehow making itself more accessible to a wider group of wheelchair users.

A wheelchair that can carry you up stairs

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