I apologize for the rushed nature of this blog post but I’ve got some packing to do and some sleep to get to!

A few months back I was watching this TED talk by Amos Winter, titled “The cheap all-terrain wheelchair.”  Winter and his team at MIT built something called the Leveraged Freedom Chair. His TED bio defines it as “a cheap level-powered wheelchair whose design and develop put the user first.”  Gone is the very typical wheelchair design, and enter is an innovative, more efficient, and some would say more practical design.

He began with the question, “How do you redesign the wheelchair, an essential aid for millions, to be even better, more affordable, adaptable for the developing world, and able to face any type of terrain or weather? ”  This chair was the answer.

Today, a colleague from my time working at my university’s newspaper sent me a link to this website.  It’s a very similar design, and I’ll be honest – I haven’t done the research myself to see if there is any overlap, but they are very similar on the surface. I wanted to thank you, Jay, for showing me this other chair.

I don’t think I would purchase one myself, but if there was ever an opportunity to rent one or to try one out, I would be all about that. If you guys have any other ideas for cool, efficient wheelchair designs, leave them in the comments!