Page 10 - Accelerating Research and Impact - Issue 7

7 ACCELERATING RESEARCH AND IMPACT
CREW
for the Caregiver
As professional problem-solvers who empathize with issues associated with an ageing society of Hong Kong, the LEI team was inspired by MIT's Participatory Design. The team took the Design with Users approach and invited 10 senior citizens as co-designers to imagine solutions to help ease caregivers’ burden in pushing wheelchairs in Hong Kong’s hilly terrain.
In an ageing population like Hong Kong, it is a common scene of an aged person being cared for by an elderly partner or descent, so the team tried working on an intelligence-assisted electric wheelchair as a solution.
The team re-designed the wheelchair handles to become pressure-sensitive so that the caregiver may push the wheelchair with assisted power using feedbacks from the caregiver’s hands. The intelligent handles, CREW Wheelchair Control System, can sense a forward-pushing or backward-dragging force of a caregiver to translate it into the motion to move forward or to apply breaks without the caregiver’s laborious effort. The team’s goal is to have wheelchairs manufactured with such intelligent handles while keeping the price affordable to the users.