Abstract
Amos Winter, a PhD candidate in mechanical engineering, along with a team of undergraduates and international design collaborators, has designed an affordable wheelchair that can carry users comfortably and efficiently off-road, which he describes as performing like a combination of a desk chair and a mountain bike "something you can comfortably sit in all day and maneuver around the office, but also use to efficiently commute to and from work." Constructed from widely available, cheap bicycle parts, the Leveraged Freedom Chair (LFC) features two large levers attached to a bicycle drivetrain that helps the chair power through mud and over rocky paths. According to the U.S. Agency for International Development, 20 million people in developing countries require wheelchairs; Winter estimates that 70 percent of those people live in rural areas where regular wheelchairs simply don't work. He has been studying the problem of wheelchair production in Third World countries since the summer of 2005, when he traveled to Tanzania on a public-service fellowship and saw firsthand how wheelchairs that rely on hand-rim propulsion are too difficult to use on rough terrain and for long-distance travel. He also learned that hand-powered tricycles are too big to use indoors and usually have only one gear. His solution - for people who grew up in a village where they were literally dragging themselves to school - is the LFC.
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