Usually stairs are a big problem for who is using a wheelchair, luckily an Israeli company called SoftWheel has developed e new generation of wheels that has its own inner-suspension system for shock absorption. Gilad Wolf was founder of SoftWheel, he is a farmer and due to a broken pelvis he had to use wheelchair for three weeks, and in that period he was in a lot of pain from passing over grooves and bumps.
As a farmer, Gilad was familiar with tractors, and he noticed that they have a simple and ingenious airbag-based shock-absorbing construct. So he put two and two together, “I built a wheelchair and combined a similar construct for each wheel. It made the wheelchair experience completely different. I took the idea and started to roll with it,” Wolf tells NoCamels.
While the company’s first product, Acrobat, is designed for wheelchairs, the company believes that this product has a much wider-ranging application and it is a platform for anything that has wheels.
The wheelchair of the future
The Acrobat is designed to absorb shock and can be adjusted for each rider. In regular wheelchairs, (even “premium” ones) shock is spread evenly throughout the wheel, then transferred in its entirety to the rider.
For more info: http://nocamels.com/2014/02/israeli-company-reinvents-the-wheel-literally/