Wheelchair to pram or pushchair adaptation - REMAP - Custom made equipment for disabled people
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Wheelchair to pram or pushchair adaptation

  • Paul Everington
  • Cleveland
  • 24-024 00007824
  • Complete
  • 0 comments

The client suffers acute pain caused by ACENS syndrome, which meant that she relied heavily on her partner to push her wheelchair for transportation.

When she became pregnant she started to become concerned about how she would manage with a pram once the baby was born and reached out to REMAP for a solution.

The Challenge

The client uses a Dash Lite 2 wheelchair for everyday mobility and has purchased an Ickle Bubba pram for her baby to use when it is born.

In order to assist mobility she wanted to be able to link the pushchair to the wheelchair so that her partner would be able to move both as a single unit.

The key requirements of the solution were to be quick and easy to use, lightweight and portable and, above all, safe in use.

 

The solution

We investigated several different approaches to joining the wheelchair to the pram.

We quickly ruled out fixing the pram onto the wheelchair as this would be both difficult to achieve and probably top heavy and unstable.

We had seen several other adaptations which used various steel frameworks to achieve a linkage whilst leaving the pram on its own wheels but again felt that they were complex, relatively fragile and time consuming to setup.

We eventually decided to use the existing wheelchair foot plates to hold a bespoke adapter that would allow the pram to be attached to the front of the footplates.

The pram was designed to allow the rear wheels to be easily removed for transportation. We took advantage of this feature as it allowed the completed rig to be easily steered from the rear handles of the wheelchair.

For safety testing we applied full body weight (77kg plus bouncing up & down) to the exiting foot plates of the wheelchair and also to a single piece of the prototype 3d printed adapters. We figured that if they could survive this weight then the parts involved would be fine with the estimated 10 to 15kg force at the rear of the pram.

A video of one of the test can be viewed here:

Prototype testing

The final adapter design can be quickly slipped over the footplates and clamped to the axle of the pram using hand tightened bolts with captive nuts. The design also incorporated ribbing for grip on the top surface and a variable density 3d printed infill to provide even more strength in critical areas of the part.

 

 

 

The benefit

The client’s partner will now be able to move the wheelchair and pushchair as a single unit, safely and easily. This will make life a lot easier for the couple, and alleviates the client’s concerns about how she would manage with a pram once the baby is born.

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