Ralf Hotchkiss was paralysed in a motorcycle crash in 1966 when he was a college student in the United States. Within minutes of leaving hospital he was sowing the seeds of his future career, designing cheap, custom-made wheelchairs for people ranging from disabled Zambian footballers to women in rural Kenyan villages. Hotchkiss is now a senior research scientist and technical director of the Wheeled Mobility Centre at San Francisco State University.
What was it like the first time you used a wheelchair?
I got half a block from the hospital before it hit a big crack in the sidewalk and the front wheel assembly was destroyed beyond repair. Many Westerners are still distributing those same chairs in the unpaved developing world. They are unstable, unsafe and heavy. What’s more, they cannot be repaired with local materials.
Is that when you decided there was room for improvement?
First of all, I looked for help to make my own chair better, but around the US and Europe I found very few wheelchair designers, largely because there was a monopoly in place that was squashing the small manufacturers. But in the developing world, I found people had already solved most of the problems. In 1980 I met four teenagers in Nicaragua who showed me a chair they had built. They looked at my fancy four-wheel-drive chair and said: “That’s very interesting and it looks a lot of fun, but it’s going to break there, there and there.” They were absolutely right.
Why are manufacturers in developing countries more innovative?
Necessity. The difference is that they are using their chairs daily on unpaved roads. In the West, chairs only have to get from the parking lot to the building. The guys in Nicaragua were going several kilometres to and from school. They were thinking hard about the problems wheelchair users face, and so created developments at a faster rate.
What are the essential things to consider when you are designing a wheelchair?
Weight and cost are crucial. The chair I’m sitting in now weighs 12,5kgs and costs between $100 and $200, depending on where it is made. Compare that with a chair from a typical manufacturer in the West, which weighs around 21kgs and costs $1 000.
Our newest chair is lighter than even the most expensive aluminium chairs, though ours is made using the cheapest steel tubing. This means the chair can be repaired easily by the local blacksmith with the same tubing that is used for restaurant chairs. Our wheelchairs also fold, which is crucial if you are travelling on public transport. If you are going from town to town on buses in Africa they will charge triple to take you and a non-folding chair.
The new chair also has a longer wheel base than the older models so it can go down a much steeper slope without tipping over. Tipping forwards is the leading cause of injuries among wheelchair users.
Do your female designers look at these problems differently?
They have come up with things that the men just completely missed. For example, one of the big problems for a wheelchair user in a developing country is how to take your bath in the morning. In many parts of Africa people use a bucket and a cup. But you don’t want to get your cushion wet because you have to sit on it all day.
Also most of the cooking, eating and child care happens at floor level and wheelchair users need to participate. So, one of the women in Kenya came up with the idea of a “jump seat”: a second, lower seat between the foot rests and the main seat. Now a user can hop down to wash, play with the kids or cook the breakfast on the little floor stove and then pop right back up again very nicely without much of a struggle. The jump seat has another use. One thing that is particularly tricky for a wheelchair user in developing countries is using a pit latrine. I surveyed numerous friends and most of them had developed tricks that involved impressive feats of agility and a better aim than mine. But the jump seat gets around that too. It has a trap door fitted, so you just park over the hole in the ground and open it up.
What was your aim in designing chairs for the Zambian wheelchair basketball team?
Wheelchair basketball in Africa is akin to American football in terms of how rough it is, so our basketball chairs were designed for doing damage to other chairs while protecting the rider’s legs. The foot rests were tucked way back inside the chair so you wouldn’t lose a foot in a collision, and they had tubes running down the outside of your shins. The chair also had a low-slung seat with a straight back for quick-turning stability and ramming power.
Have you found expertise in wheelchair design useful in other industries?
Omar Talavera, one of those four Nicaraguan teenagers I met in 1980, became our first and best mechanic. He has ended up specialising in capsule design at Nasa’s Ames Research Centre in California. Talavera built seats for the centrifuge capsules used in training, much as he had built wheelchair cushions in Nicaragua.
Why would a wheelchair user and an astronaut need similar seat designs?
Wheelchair users with limited sensation are at risk from pressure sores. These can be fatal if they become infected, so a comfortable seat is essential. That’s a very similar situation to a pilot in a space capsule who is subjected to strong forces.
How do you promote knowledge about wheelchair design in developing countries?
Twenty years ago we produced a book called Independence Through Mobility, which explains how to build a wheelchair from scratch. It is also an introduction to running a small business and includes information on appropriate tools that can be found or made locally. We run a class on wheelchair design and construction in the engineering school of San Francisco State University and some of our students go home and train other people.
Do you think the rights of disabled people are improving globally?
The attitude in many developing countries is different to the West. There is less reticence in asking for help and more willingness to offer it without being embarrassed. Also people don’t pretend not to see you. The disability rights movement has erupted spontaneously all over the world. In Uganda, for example, the Constitution now recognises people with disabilities as a sector of the population that deserves representation in the government, along with women, racial and religious groups. As a result about 40 000 disabled Ugandans are in elected positions ranging from the smallest village council to Cabinet level.