Past Project Spotlight: Ex-Able
Team members: Nathan, Alyssa, Dominic, Ethan
What challenge are you hoping to solve?
Our idea is called Ex-Able, a car chair designed for wheelchair users, for the elderly or any person who has reduced mobility. Our project’s aim is to enable people living with disabilities to enter a vehicle smoothly and efficiently, providing both comfort and accessibility.
Our inspiration for this idea came from the documentary ‘Breaking Boundaries’ by inspirational speaker Jack Kavanagh. In this documentary we see Jack completing everyday tasks as a wheelchair user. One such task was attempting to get into a car however this task proved uncomfortable and time consuming for Jack. Our idea aims to solve this problem.
How does your idea work?
The ExAble chair autonomously moves a certain angle and height to assist people with reduced mobility to gain easy access into their car, either on the passenger or driver side.
We’ve also thought of some ideas to improve the quality of the chair, features such as:
Adding an app where a series of commands will be shown, such as automatically fasten the seatbelt, lower or raise chair height. We envision this app could work via Bluetooth or voice commands.
We’ve also thought of an inbuilt air condition system, this is for the elderly living in humid/hot countries as they are vulnerable to heat stroke.
