[FONT=arial]Last stair-climbing wheelchair raises high-tech questions](http://www.rdmag.com/ShowPR.aspx?PUBCODE=014&ACCT=1400000101&ISSUE=0905&RELTYPE=LST&PRODCODE=00000000&PRODLETT=ME&CommonCount=0)
This is unbelievable. What a closed minded system we have that would allow this to cease production.
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It is a hard lesson for an engineer to learn that “social engineering” can be just as or more important than the engineering we are trained for.
Yet another thing wrong with the healthcare system if you ask me. A fantastic, life changing product and then Medicare decides it’s not worth it for the disabled? 
Medicare didn’t say it wasn’t worth it, they said that the people who need wheelchairs don’t need THIS wheelchair. They can live a normal life with a wheelchair that doesn’t go up and down stairs or raise them to standing height. You don’t have to have stairs in your house and if you don’t have stairs why do you need a wheelchair that goes up and down stairs? Buildings are supposed to be wheelchair accessible nowadays, so why do they need chairs that go up stairs if you can get around with out stairs?
Now im not saying that Medicare is right, but i can see the reason they don’t want to fork out $22,000 dollars for a device that isn’t really needed.
I have to say that if i ever have the need for a wheel chair i would totally
want one of these because i find that the “raising you to eye level” with “normal” people is the best aspect of the chair not the going up stairs.
If the makers of the Ibot found a way to make them more economically friendly these chairs would be the norm, but until they do people are going to have to continue to use the devices that they can afford and that their insurance companies will help pay for.
On the contrary it could drive home the point that Engineers need to strive for innovation in the manufacturing process in order to reduce costs, even after a product’s design is considered to be complete.
Living in central London, I can’t even imagine life in a wheelchair. THREE of the about 50 tube stations in zones 1 and 2 are wheelchair accessible. Things were not built to be wheelchair friendly, with many buildings a few hundred years old. Retrofits are often roundabout and tricky to find, though I imagine things are a lot better than 10 years ago when the IBOT was first released. I was just on crutches for a while, and stairs where tricky and I avoided them when I could. They surprisingly hard to avoid, and going around was often a LONG way around.
Spend a day not using any step over 6 inches, not even in a wheelchair, and you will get a bit of an idea how different life would be.
Wetzel
That’s a little pathetic in my eyes. Everyone knows that life is full of compromises…but really? Seriously? Compromising the well-being of one another? That is truly pathetic.
It’s not as simple as you make it out to be.
They cost a lot of money, money isn’t made on trees.
It’d be nice to feed every starving person and help everyone who needs it, but you can’t do that by just deciding to do it. If you want help to occur, you have to take action to make sure it is resourced and funded.
It’s not a perfect world, but it’s the world we live in, so learn how to work it.
I once sprained my ankle and had to use elevators for weeks. Although it was not close to being comparable to a being in a wheelchair, I discovered that, without stairs, life is hard. I discovered that the only times I went to my locker, I used stairs to get there and then I used them again to go back to where I started. I also realized how hard it was to attend a regional without using stairs.
In the area of Austin where I live and drive through during the week, to and from work, it doesn’t take long to see the crying need for better and improved motorized scooters and wheelchairs for the people who use them to get where they are going. The wheelchairs are the worst by far. People use them because it is what they have, what they can afford, what they know to be available. Every day, I think about the wonders of the iBOT and how even a portion of that quality, technological whizardry, and robustness could benefit these folks who depend on the chairs and scooters for some quality of life each day.
A culture where engineering is embraced, but not at all costs.
I worked for a mobility company (wheelchair accessable vehicles) as my first internship (The Braun Corporation). It was founded by the owner that had personal mobility issues.
While there the most important lesson I saw was sometimes you have to walk in anothers shoes before you can understand. I would ask that members of congress that are going to write policy on what get covered try the alternatives for 2-3 days. The owner of the company I worked at asked another young engineer to pretend for 1 week that his legs were paralized and to use their vehicles and a wheelchair. He gave up after 2 days, and the owner was OK with that because in the two days he had experienced what it was like.
This saddens me because the wrong problem was solved with this resolution. The problem was that the device was too expensive for insurance/government to afford. Their solution was to not cover it. The real solution should have looked into what it takes to get the iBOT from $22K to $10K. I am sure the makers knew what the required volume would be.
This spells bad knews for the Luke Arm. An interesting protest would be to see a march with persons with their arms tied requesting that Congress do the same for a day or two before legislating life changing device…
The economics of the IBOT is something like this:
Initially, reports said it would cost around $29,000. If they got it down to $22,000, that’s a tremendous price drop! The other thing is that retrofitting a house for a standard wheelchair can cost as much as the IBOT–but I suppose Medicare doesn’t pay for housing retrofits.
Here in California, I’m seeing more and more homes (in fact, most homes being built these days) that have stairs, and no elevators. When I was a kid, most houses here were one story and had just a few steps up to the front door–but even those would be impossible for a regular wheelchair. As the population ages, and more people have trouble getting around, this is going to be a huge problem.
So I hope that they keep the tooling and design for the IBOT, and will be ready to resume production (maybe of a cheaper, even better version) when things change.
The other thing to keep in mind-- If Congress and Medicare are this bad now, just think what it’ll be like if the U.S. gets nationalized health care!
I really don’t want to get into a political debate about national healthcare, but I don’t think private insurance covers the iBOT either.
I’m sure Congress is well aware of the benefits something like the iBOT provides people with disabilities. Rhode Island congressman Jim Langevin has come to the Boston regional a few times to sing it’s praises, and always delivers an inspirational speech about how technology and engineers make lives better through innovation.
The real challenge is making these innovations more accessible to a wider range of people. When the first computers were built, they took up hundreds of square feet, and were only capable of a few specialized tasks. They also carried a hefty price tag, and were only predicted to become larger and more expensive over time. To quote Professor Frink from The Simpsons- “within 100 years, computers will be twice as powerful, ten thousand times larger, and so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe will own them. M-huy.”
As I get ready to leave for work, I put my iPhone in my pocket and think back to the '50s, '60s, and '70s. I wonder if anyone back then could imagine the possibility of a device hundreds to thousands of times more computationally powerful than the systems running the Apollo spacecraft, in a size smaller than a wallet.
Looking back at how much life has changed over the last 50 years makes me think ahead to the inventions and innovations that are just now making their way out of development, and wonder what the next 50 or 100 years will bring. The iBOT is a fantastic piece of equipment, though prohibitively expensive for many. Material and manufacturing breakthroughs may one day make such things more accessible, just as it did for cars and computers.
You know, the two main functions that everyone sites are its ability to climb stairs, and its ability to “stand up”. While I am sure it was capable of much more, sometimes the extras aren’t worth the cost. If given the constraints of climbing a random set of stairs, and having a “Stand” mode that raise the occupant to eye level, What would you design?
I would love to see part of this years challenge be to carry a 200 lb payload up a flight of steps.
In the long run, it’s a better solution to retrofit older commercial and industrial buildings and bring them up ADA compliant standards, as that attacks the cause of the problem. Eliminate the cause, and there are no effects. But as ADA only applies to new [re]construction, it will be a while before replacement by attrition brings the majority of grandfathered buildings up to code. Add onto that the fact that ADA only applies to the United States, the potential for the iBOT to bring about positive impact on the world is still quite large. Unfortunately the steep price tag doomed it.
It’s like [photovoltaic] solar power. I’m pretty sure the vast majority of people (except for the coal and oil industry barons) have no doubts about its positive impacts on electricity generation with respect to environmental sustainability and energy independence. But up until recently, the high price per kWh has doomed the technology to niche status. Now as of late, recent improvements at both ends of the spectrum - either making solar power cheaper or building higher output panels - have brought the technology closer to widespread adoption. Once the price is right, you’ll see solar capturing technology on every roof outside of Seattle.
Unfortunately, it’s the revolutionary technology - the ones that run full speed, blazing a new path to the future - that often proves to be the martyr, to go out in a blaze of glory. They were too much, too soon, too before their time. We can only hope someone, maybe not necessary DEKA, will pick up the pieces, and as economic feasibility allows, continue adding the technology Frankenstein-like into existing technology, as the world constantly marches forward to the drumbeat of progress. It may be a while, but someday we will have another iBOT. Maybe not in name, but in the spirit of the technology developed at DEKA. (Kind of like how the first major wave of electric cars in the 1990s, such as the GM EV1, [strike]were killed[/strike] paved the way for a more sustainable second wave of hybrid, plug-in hybrid, and electric vehicles beginning to sweep the market today.)
