To Tony and Dave,  This amazing story may be of interest to you or some
one you know.  Gordon

FEATURES: 26 Aug 00 #36 Access all areas: High kerbs, steep slopes and
stairs are well-nigh impossible for your average wheelchair to cope
with, but now there's a chair that will even catch you when you fall,
says Bennett Daviss. I'm on Easy Street. However, from where I'm
sitting, it looks anything but. Easy Street is a lab in a renovated mill
in Manchester, New Hampshire. Only you won't find lasers and test tubes
in this open-plan, single-storey room, only a very unusual assault
course. There are stairs everywhere, lots of ramps, kerbs and even a
long thin sandpit. This strange lab houses Project Fred-a secret
endeavour started six years ago by Deka, an engineering and development
company. More than 60 of Deka's staff now work full-time on Fred. The
project has attracted a commercial partner in Johnson & Johnson and
consumed more than Dollars 100 million in capital. And I'm sitting in
the result-the world's most sophisticated wheelchair. Deka refers to its
invention-the Independence 3000 IBOT-not as a chair, but as an
all-terrain transporter. At first glance the IBOT looks similar to a
typical electric wheelchair. The main difference is that instead of two
very large rear wheels, it has four small powered wheels, two on each
side, plus two small castor wheels, one below each of the passenger's
feet. But this isn't simply a piece of rolling furniture: it's a
sophisticated vehicle with on-board intelligence and powerful four-wheel
drive that would be the envy of Detroit. It even has an innate sense of
balance. Most importantly for disabled people, the IBOT is going to
equal the stakes. They'll be able to travel faster, negotiate irregular
surfaces with ease, and if they want to reach the top shelf, they can.
The IBOT allows its passenger to feel six feet tall, literally. It's
time for project manager Lucas Merrow to demonstrate the IBOT's powers.
He hops into the seat and enters a few quick keystrokes on the control
pad built into the armrest. This is to program the IBOT to respond for
his body weight and height. Motors and gears hum into action, driving
the transporter gently over a kerb. But Merrow doesn't tilt dangerously
backward as he would in a standard wheelchair. The passenger seat tilts,
keeping him perfectly level. Next, the IBOT breezes up an 18-degree ramp
from street level to an elevated platform. 'Way steeper than allowed by
US law,' he says. Using a joystick alongside the keypad, Merrow turns
the transporter in a circle over the rough cobblestones on the platform.
It spins around on the spot. In a normal wheelchair 'a disabled person
would need a lot of upper body strength to do that', says Merrow. Then
he pushes the joystick forward and plunges into the sand trough.
Amazingly, he and the IBOT sail through the 20-centimetre deep sand like
a sailboat on water. 'We had a disabled man in his regular chair try to
do that,' says Merrow. 'He had tremendous muscular development in his
upper body and he couldn't get much farther than a metre.' Next, Merrow
backs up to the bottom of a staircase and taps a few keys. This is where
the IBOT really starts to show its skills. As Merrow grabs the stair's
handrail beside him, the front-drive wheels rise up and revolve over the
ones behind. As these wheels meet and settle on the tread of the first
step, the rear pair repeat the action, pulling the chair upwards and
backwards. With Merrow gripping the handrail for control, the wheels
revolve backwards over each other in a kind of mechanical hand-over
hand-lifting chair and passenger up the stairs. To come back down,
Merrow simply reverses the action and the IBOT rolls back down: the
rear-drive wheels rise up, over and down past the front-drive wheels to
settle on the step below and so on. But Merrow has saved the most
dramatic feat for last. Back on level ground, he suddenly rears up and
throws himself backwards in the chair with as much force as he can
muster. The chair begins to tip backwards and I lunge to grab him.
Before I can reach him, the IBOT rises to the occasion. A motor under
the seat lifts the transporter's two front-drive wheels off the
ground-just as they did when Merrow started to climb the stairs. But the
motor stops when the wheels are directly above the other pair. So now,
instead of the drive wheels being side by side, one pair is atop the
other (see Diagram, p 30). Within seconds, I'm looking Merrow in the
eye. Now that the transporter is raised up on two wheels, he is sitting
at standing height. The IBOT is balancing on two wheels the way that
most people balance on two feet. 'It doesn't take that much force to
raise the IBOT to two wheels,' says Merrow. 'You can do it with a shrug,
a push off a solid object, or by tapping the keypad. If you're on a
smooth, level surface, you can ride around on two wheels as easily as if
you were down on all four.' As Merrow stirs and shifts in the seat, the
two wheels on the floor move constantly, inching back and forth to keep
him upright-the mechanical equivalent of a person unconsciously shifting
body weight from foot to foot while standing still. Suddenly Merrow
throws himself backward again, but the transporter races back to stay
under him. He starts to fall forward out of the chair and it scoots
forwards to catch him. He taps a few keys to settle the IBOT back down
on four wheels. 'You try it,' he says. It takes me a few
tries-abandoning your physical safety to the intelligence of an
inanimate object takes some doing. Once I'm balanced aloft in the IBOT,
Merrow holds up his hands, palms toward me. 'Push,' he commands. We lock
fingers. I push. The machine beneath me doesn't roll back-it stands its
ground. 'Harder,' Merrow urges. I push harder, as hard as I can, and
after a few moments Merrow staggers backward under the force. 'Under any
but the most extreme force, the IBOT won't let you fall,' he says. The
secret lies not only in the durability of its motors and gears, but also
in the host of sensors, solid-state gyroscopes and three Pentium-class
processors mounted beneath the seat. The sensors 'feel' things, for
example when the wheels have run up against the riser of the next stair.
The gyroscopes determine balance and the pro-cessors make the million
tiny decisions that allow the IBOT to get around. If you look at the
chair and its rider from the side, you can imagine a pyramid: the apex
is the driver's head and the front and rear of the chair's base form two
of the bottom edges of the pyramid. The job of the processors and the
gyroscopes is to make sure that the pyramid's centre line remains
parallel to the force of gravity-even when the chair's chassis tips. It
was back in 1991 that Dean Kamen, Deka's founder, first thought of this
remarkable wheelchair. While at a shopping mall, he watched a strapping
young man in a wheelchair try repeatedly to heft himself up and over a
kerb. If we can put a man on the Moon, thought Kamen, why can't we get a
man in a wheelchair over a kerb? Kamen wasn't one to let the problem go.
At college, he'd patented the first automatic portable infusion pump for
dispensing drugs. At 25, he founded a medical device firm, AutoSyringe.
Kamen began prototyping a vast array of ideas to solve the wheelchair
problem. 'Walking machines, robotic legs, things you'd strap onto
yourself, things that were unstable and unreliable,' Merrow says. 'That
went on for three or four years.' The turning point came when Kamen had
a near-accident of his own. Getting out of the shower, he slipped on the
wet floor and windmilled his arms to catch his balance. 'It dawned on
him that in order to have a machine that could do what he'd just done,
which was to lose his balance and then recover,' says Merrow, 'you had
to have a machine with a sense of balance in the first place.' So Kamen
went back to his lab and built a platform with two legs, with the whole
thing mounted on wheels. It had a bunch of circuit boards with wires
hanging off, some bicycle chains and a pair of motors from an old sewing
machine, Merrow says. 'It was rickety. It shook and shuddered. But it
worked.' At that point, Kamen assigned a few of his engineers to take
things farther. Someone on the development team realised that they
couldn't climb kerbs and stairs using one drive wheel on each side of
the chair. So they put two on each side, added a pair of smaller wheels
and slid a desktop PC under the seat. 'That's the machine we took to
Johnson & Johnson in 1995,' Merrow says. Kamen knew that Deka needed a
manufacturing and marketing partner. But they didn't know who. 'We
thought, 'this is a vehicle', so we talked to the car companies,' Merrow
recalls. 'But the IBOT has orders of magnitude more software, processing
power and back-up systems than a car has. To a car company, the IBOT
looks more like a computer. But to a computer company, it looks more
like a vehicle.' They also talked to defence contractors, who were
accustomed to making complex combinations of hardware and software. 'But
they were never comfortable about how their expertise (would) fit the
project,' he says. As part of the search, Kamen contacted Robert Gussin,
then Johnson & Johnson's chief technology officer. Gussin saw the
transporter's prototype and became a convert. However, his bosses were a
tougher nut to crack. 'Johnson & Johnson had once owned what is now the
world's largest wheelchair company,' Merrow says. 'They decided that
they didn't like that business and they sold it. But Gussin kept
pressing them, telling them that this is nothing like a regular
wheelchair, it's the kind of thing that can turn an industry on its
head, and the kind of thing that the company should be doing.' Asking
difficult questions Eventually, Gussin's persistence paid off. Johnson &
Johnson licensed the IBOT's design and technology from Deka and set up a
small company called Independence Technology to make and sell it. For
the next year, an IBOT project team travelled the US convening more than
30 focus groups of up to 20 wheelchair users each. 'We asked them what
they like about the chair they use now, what they wish was different,'
Merrow says. 'If you could have anything you wanted, what would it be?
Which wish would come second? What kind of trade-offs would you be
willing to make?' Through the discussions and more than a thousand
questionnaires, the team discovered an untapped market: more than two
million wheelchair users in the US alone. 'They aren't in nursing homes
or hospitals, they have more and more discretionary income to spend, and
no one is treating them like customers,' Merrow says. 'Chair makers deal
primarily with insurance carriers, not directly with users, so they're
trying to keep insurance companies happy by keeping prices down. No one
has ever bothered to ask disabled people what they want in a
wheelchair.' The hardest work came next: not just creating the hardware
and software to carry out the tasks the users were calling for, but
integrating those parts into a practical system. 'We didn't have to
invent hardware, but we had to work with vendors to get them to
understand our requirements,' Merrow explains. 'For example, the company
that makes transmissions for the IBOT also makes transmissions for
high-performance cars. Our transmissions needed some similar
characteristics but also some very different ones, such as the ability
to spin gears backwards as well as forwards.' Two of the three main
limitations were power and space. The transporter had to fit through the
narrowest doorways and hold a human frame, yet carry enough batteries,
gears and motors to tote a person weighing as much as 115 kilograms-the
IBOT's weight limit-over kerbs and up ramps and stairs. Months went into
reshaping and streamlining components, cajoling suppliers to shave a
centimetre here or a few grams there, fitting the entire thing into a
space roughly half a metre square and a third of a metre high. The
third, but most important requirement is safety. 'We have three
processors so they can vote,' Merrow says. If you're going over a kerb,
what command do you send to the motor? How much torque do you apply? 'If
there's one (processor) and it's wrong, you're in trouble. If there are
two and they disagree, the device comes to a stop.' It's the same
problem when the chair is balanced on two wheels. 'If one processor
fails, you fall over. If you have two and they disagree, the machine
freezes-and you still fall over. You need three to validate decisions.'
The IBOT has two nickel-cadmium batteries, each of which can supply
enough power to keep the device moving on its own. Together they will
power the transporter for about 25 kilometres non-stop on a smooth,
level surface. 'They were designed to provide a typical user with enough
power to get through an average day,' Merrow says. There are also three
motors. One spins the single axle attached to the two pairs of drive
wheels, enabling the IBOT to climb stairs and balance upright. The other
two motors drive the wheels directly, one motor per pair. If a motor
overheats, the chair automatically slows to a crawl and a yellow warning
light appears on the armrest's control panel. If overheating continues,
the chair simply stops. 'It's virtually impossible to burn out a motor
on this device,' Merrow says. This summer Deka opened a durability
testing area the size of a gymnasium. Two shifts of eight volunteers
will each spend eight hours a day using the chairs non-stop-up and down
stairs and ramps, in and out of vans, through puddles and sand pits,
over rough surfaces, indoors and out. Meanwhile, IBOTs are being put
through a gamut of other tests to check they can withstand the stresses
of everyday life. Deka and Johnson & Johnson have been feeding their
test data to the US Food and Drug Administration. 'They've been great,'
Merrow says, 'they've put us on a fast track for approval.' The IBOT is
expected to be certified for commercial sale as a medical device some
time next year. The price tag: Dollars 25 000. But will it sell at that
price, especially in enough volume to recoup the Dollars 100 million
that the two companies have sunk into the venture? 'We can't know for
sure,' Merrow admits. 'But this isn't entirely about business. This is
something we couldn't not do. No one listens to people with
disabilities, but they want to be treated like anyone else-like
customers. We're going to give it a shot.' Bennett Daviss is a freelance
writer basedin New Hampshire For more information, see www.indetech.com
New Scientist Page_28; Photograph (omitted); Illustration (omitted)
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VICUG-L is the Visually Impaired Computer User Group List.
To join or leave the list, send a message to
[log in to unmask]  In the body of the message, simply type
"subscribe vicug-l" or "unsubscribe vicug-l" without the quotations.
 VICUG-L is archived on the World Wide Web at
http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/vicug-l.html