Training Wheelchairs are a Game Changer

Blog: Training Wheelchairs

You’ve no doubt heard of training wheels – the small wheels attached to the back of children’s bicycles when they’re first learning to ride.

But you may not have heard of training wheelchairs, a.k.a. mobility trainers. These tiny, hand-constructed wooden chairs “help children build independence and strength as they prepare for the real thing,” writes Barry Bronston, Assistant Director of Public Relations at New Orleans- based Tulane University.

This year, biomedical engineering students at Tulane partnered with local nonprofit MakeGood and Israeli nonprofit TOM Global to create the first 15 mobility trainers. MakeGood founder, Noam Platt, a health architect living in New Orleans, is committed to making devices that aren’t available in commercial marketplaces and/or are too expensive for most people to afford. Platt first came across instructions for designing the chairs on an Israeli website called Tikkun Olam Makers. Tikkum olam means “repair the world” in Hebrew.

Upon the chairs’ completion, many of the trainers were donated to a local health system for use in its physical and occupational therapy practices. Others were given to children who needed them. Prior to receiving the trainers, many of these children spent the majority of their lives on their backs. Now, they are able to sit upright, move around, explore their environments, play and socialize–all essential activities for cognitive and physical development!

Wheelchairs for children do exist but Platt explains that most insurance companies won’t cover them for kids too young to operate them efficiently. Whereas a typical child’s wheelchair can cost anywhere between $1,000 and $10,000, mobility chairs cost less than $200 to make. That said, Tulane’s BME department is continuing to raise money for the project through its David A. Rice Design Endowed Fund in Biomedical Engineering.

As part of their preparation to build the chairs, students consulted with experts to understand the needs of the children who will be using them. As Tulane biomedical engineering instructor Katherine Raymond Ph.D. said in a press release, “designers need to understand the needs deeply in order to solve them. BME students do a great deal of researching, shadowing and interviewing before they even begin to ideate their solutions for medical problems.”

Recent Tulane graduate and former team design member Elana Kraversky echoed her former instructor in the same press release. “Lots of our coursework in BME encourages us to prioritize the mental states of patients just as much as their physical states. Knowing that we can make these kids happier, regardless of what they are going through, makes all the difference.”