Amos Winter: The cheap all-terrain wheelchair
How do you build a wheelchair ready to blaze through mud and sand, all for under $200? MIT engineer Amos Winter guides us through the mechanics of an all-terrain wheelchair that’s cheap and easy to build — for true accessibility — and gives us some lessons he learned along the road.
Amos Winter and his team at MIT built the Leveraged Freedom Chair, a cheap lever-powered wheelchair whose design and develop put the user first.
WHY YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO HIM
Amos Winter wants to know: How do you redesign the wheelchair, an essential aid for millions, to be even better, more affordable, adaptable for the developing world, and able to face any type of terrain or weather? The answer is: the Leveraged Freedom Chair. Integrating science, engineering and user-driven design, Winter has developed a wheelchair that uses arm-powered levers that yield surprisingly simple, highly effective mechanical results. Even better, cheap parts means the chair costs under $200 and can be repaired easily, even in rural communities where resources are scarce.
