Wheel Chair - A Necessary Device For Disabled People
Wheelchair is a device that is usually used for giving mobility to disabled persons or persons suffering with injury, illness. It is as the name suggest simply wheel with chair. It is widely used for providing the mobility to patients, passengers at airports, or to people suffering with injury. Wide variety of wheelchairs are available: electric wheelchair, ATV wheel chair, automated wheelchair etc. depending upon their usages, adaptations
One common problem is that there needs to be one-person present to take care of the person that is being carried on wheelchair. So that he/she can push the person and take care of him on the lift, stairs or any much of an obstruction such as potholes. Also, if he/she wants to do a simple task as simple as to get off bed in the morning, but can’t do it without the help of any other person, because the other person needs to hold him and make him sit on the wheelchair, thus making the patient dependent on him and must wait for him to come. The most common thing is for the patient to climb stairs and that is the most difficult task that comes in front of the patients. Some person needs to carry him first and then the wheelchair which is a tedious task to do and if that one person is not present there then there is no way that he/she could accomplish the task themselves. Same goes for climbing down the stairs.
Other problem that we observed was that besides the basic model, other wheelchair in markets were too expensive ranging from 10,000 INR to 20,00,000 INR. And although there is vast range of wheelchair available, but they just focus on one problem, rather than handling all the problems together.
Problem Specification: There are several problems that we have faced while making this project. When we took this project, we chose several features many of which were not compatible with one another. So, we had to filter them out according to our basic needs and features that we had discussed to keep.After that possibly the most important feature that were to be kept needed to be decided i.e., stair climbing mechanism. It needed to be decided and required severe research before implementing it, also we needed it to be such that, it caused very less discomfort to the person sitting on the wheelchair. We finally decided to go with belt drive that would help us to climb, because other mechanism that we found, were either very hard to implement or could not climb the steep stair, that is common in India. They were only suitable for a defined height.
After deciding the mechanism, it came to hand calculations for the components, such as diameter of pulley, power and torque of motor that we will employ for climbing and movement purpose. Although we have studied for designing the belts in our subjects but there always the load is defined and then the calculations are done. We were having the problem to implement in, but with the help of our faculties, we were able to do it and check for the stresses through the data available in the catalogue and thus able to know the value of all the unknowns and thus carry on to next step design.There were also problems faced on these, but they were overcome with the help of tutorials, available online and the help of our faculties. We knew the basics and have designed our projects in the PTC Creo therefore it was easy to do that by learning. However, it took several tries to get that right as it was decided early.
