411–420 of 456 posts
"To be clear, Not a Wheelchair isn’t a nonprofit — it’s currently licensed as a benefit company, a newer designation of a for-profit company that provides a public service."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, you can't buy a reasonable quality wheelchair for less. You can buy what a person who doesn't need a wheelchair consider reasonable. If you had to use those cheap chairs for 16 hours a day, and pushing yourself even just for a mile of well paved roads, not even uphill, you would never consider those reasonable.
Except the wheelchairs used in hospitals are to push patients short distances across hard flat floors.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In India millions of women are walking miles to fetch few gallons of water everyday. I don't get why people in California are screaming water shortage. Should be possible for Americans to live on a gallon of water if hundred of millions live like that in India.
It’s very hard to change your standard of living, and the standard of living in California is very different. We live off of tens of gallons of water a day or more. When you have to cut back, it’s difficult for your human animal to accept it. Population wide, it’s nearly impossible.
Living minimally is a skill that society has essentially turned into a negative trait. Our planet can only support so much, and individual humans are very selfish. There are 8 Billion now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You cannot get a custom designed bicycle for your body for a few hundred bucks, particularly from a US manufacturer
How many wheelchairs are actually truely customized? I hear a lot of complaints from wheelchair manufacturers that this isn't really customized
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was curious so looked at a few power wheelchairs...It's wild how expensive they are, especially considering the advancements in electric mobility tech elsewhere. You'd think they'd share some components with e-scooters, e-bikes, or even electric cars – motors, batteries, controllers. Are the powertrains and control systems in power wheelchairs really that specialised? Or is it another case of the medical device mar…
I'm a guy who has disassembled and reverse engineered a standard Jazzy power chair, and what I noticed was the attention to detail regarding failures. The chair is thoroughly designed to shut down at the slightest bit of trouble. There's some redundancy in things like the controller, where it used redundant hall effect sensors that were identical to the others, but ran in an inverted power profile, to detect any weir…
Add a hat and a scarf on a wire and you've got a Halloween prop.
In the UK you can buy a simple wheelchair for 132 GBP: https://www.uk-wheelchairs.co.uk/ugo-essential-self-propelle... And what look like slightly fancier ones for between 300 and 500 GBP: https://www.millercare.co.uk/collections/self-propel-wheelch... A magnesium alloy framed one is only 450 GBP: https://www.mobilitysmart.co.uk/magnelite-self-propelled-whe... So what am I missing?
1) How uncomfortable lower end chairs can be for their users
2) How many of the little design decisions in lower end chairs can add up to a lot of pain
3) The chairs you buy online are almost exclusively all made in China using Chinese labor and pricing, where as the one in the linked article is made in the US paying US wages
But I want to talk about 1 and 2 for a moment. My spouse has developed a need for a wheel chair from time to time, so we originally bought a cheap one, just like many of the ones listed there. Specifically we bought one of these Drive chairs for about $140 (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008KMKVEK/).
Among the small "papercuts" of using this thing:
* It was extremely uncomfortable after an hour or so. Bringing extra cushions and padding was a must
* The bearings were pretty awful and there was quite a bit of rolling resistance
* After enough times being transported folded up in a trunk, the plastic wheels deformed enough that one side rubbed on the frame every rotation. Not enough to make it unusable, but enough to add even more rolling resistance, in addition to requiring constant adjustments to keep going straight
* Misc bolts and pieces on the frame would catch and lock with each other making un-folding or folding the chair unexpectedly complex at random times
* 41 lbs is a LOT of extra weight to be rolling around with just your arms when you're already trying to roll yourself along.
* There was so much slop in the frame, rolling over any uneven surfaces was an exercise in frustration at best. Everything moved and shifted and your balance was all over as things twisted and buckled under any surface that was a completely flat linoleum hospital floor. In fact the thing that finally did the chair in was a trip to a park where we needed to be rolling over the grass and roots and dirt. A twist too far going over a rough patch of ground broke some of the pieces that hold everything together.
It was a perfectly serviceable chair for an occasional need that lasted us about 4 years of light duty use (some of which was during COVID, so very light duty in some cases). And when we replaced it, we never even considered buying the same one. It wasn't worth the money saved. It's hard to really describe, but all the little pain points made it so that in many ways the chair felt more limiting than the medical condition itself. And we were and are extremely fortunate that we're still able to decide on a case by case basis whether to use or not use the chair. If it was something we had to use every day, all day, I would wager by the end of the first month we would have been looking for something else, and it might have lasted a whole year before breaking.
$1k for a manual wheelchair? and that is considered cheap? I have no idea why a wheelchair should be that expensive. We get them here in India for far less - you can buy pretty good wheelchairs for much less than $100. You can get powered wheelchairs for around $500. https://www.amazon.in/b/ref=dp_bc_aui_C_3?ie=UTF8&node=11365...
I have no idea why a car should be more than 10k. On Amazon you can get a go-kart for less than 100: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=go-kart
It is really the same comparison. A true every-day wheelchair or a "hospital" wheelchair that will make you sweat after 10 yards
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those are not good wheelchairs for independent people to spend 16+ hours in. I work in EMS and see all kinds of "budget" wheelchairs and they'll all shit. The parts alone for this lightweight chair have to crack $300.
I don't doubt it, but just out of curiosity, could you elaborate the ways in which they're shit?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just from googling -- an orbit reader 40-cell appears to cost $1,700 USD, is there a reason this doesn't actually solve the same problem as the 6,000 euro display, or are these not available in your market for that cost? Sorry if my question is off the mark, I don't know a lot about this and your comment piqued my curiosity.
Orbit reader is the most low-quality device you can find on the market. This is like suggesting a bicycle to someone complaining about car prices.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm actually surprised it's 1 billion, when you remove children, elderly, people simply out of shape for a bike, people unable to afford a bike no matter how cheap, people with disabilities incompatible with bikes, that billion is like 75%+ coverage of TAM.
Is that 1 billion adult bikes in particular? Because in the US, anywhere outside of big cities or college towns, children are ALMOST the only people who ride bikes regularly.