Custom fit lightweight wheelchairs are expensive. My Ti-Lite (one of the most popular lightweight chair brands) Aero Z starts at $3k and goes up quickly with wheels and backrest and casters and various other options that I need for sitting 16 hours a day without creating more problems. Insurance covers this for me every 5 years, but of course that's not a luxury every one has. Most plans don't cover DME 100%.
What Zack and Cambry are doing is great.
(edit) I’d like to add that I think part of being able to drive costs down is that they’re not offering these via insurance so they sidestep the need for FDA approval to market it as a medical device (hence the company name), CMS approval and HCPCS coding and all the regulatory costs that come with that.
Now don't get me started on power wheelchair cost...
It's odd seeing the number of dismissive comments missing that there are whole categories of wheelchairs for different purposes. It's like asking why XPSs exist when there are Chromebooks, something most people commenting here would immediately realize as a silly question because they suit different needs and functions but the idea doesn't come up because it's an unfamiliar problem.
That sort of “I googled for 30 seconds, and found a cheaper option, why does this project exist” type response is anti-curiosity and anti-learning.
It is possible that the YouTuber guy is a total idiot and decided to make a $1000 wheelchair instead of buying a $200 one, but that shouldn’t be a default assumption, haha.
I couldn’t upvote this enough. A lot of drive-by cynicism I see these days is really just a lack of curiosity and bad faith assumptions (this guy must be an idiot, etc.).
I see it a lot in practice especially when discussing early-stage business ideas.
> A lot of drive-by cynicism I see these days is really just a lack of curiosity and bad faith assumptions (this guy must be an idiot, etc.).
You're talking if guys pitching overpriced and underquality gear is completely unheard of, or if flawed business ideas are a rare occurrence.
I get it, support and enthusiasm is always nice to have. But if you descend into the real world you'll see that more often than not you'll see a mix of fraud and overconfident people pitching undercooked ideas that they under deliver, and you're criticizing those who might as well have experienced that first-hand for a few times.
There's another choice, though: instead of being a drive-by cynic, just move on and don't comment.
It's not like these people are providing a valuable service, steering everyone away from the dumb scams. They're just pattern matching and assuming everything they doesn't seem to make sense (in their generally not-well-informed opinion) must be bad.
It's unnecessary, and is noise just as often as it's not.
Well, I guess since I disagree with you, I must be an inhabitant of this non-real world. Dang, I wish I’d thought to deem myself the arbiter of reality.
But from here, floating in the imaginary clouds, the error of the cynics was pretty easy to spot. It was that there are different types of wheelchairs and the cynics were just googling up the bargain-basement mass produced ones. I guess in the real world everything (including medical devices) is one-size-fits-all?
You nailed it. If I could go a bit deeper, I think the drive-by cynicism comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of people.
Statistically, you are probably not significantly smarter or dumber than most people you meet. In other words, someone who has spent months or years on a problem probably knows more about it than you do if you’re just now reading about it. So if someone with more experience is doing something you think is dumb, your first reaction should be to ask why rather than dismiss.
Indeed. If I google for 30 seconds, and see a stark contradiction with what somebody offers, I try not to conclude that that the guy in question is a fool. This is always possible, but rarely true.
Instead I conclude that likely my understanding is lacking, and maybe educating myself a little bit would be beneficial. Either I find out something new and potentially useful about the world, or finally see through a swindle and understand how it works, which is always a good skill to exercise.
>It is possible that the YouTuber guy is a total idiot and decided to make a $1000 wheelchair instead of buying a $200 one, but that shouldn’t be a default assumption, haha.
Seems insane to assume that but we see it in tech all the time where someone unknowingly spends a ton of money on reinventing something that already exists.
If you have some actual knowledge about a thing and can explain why it's pointless and already existed then that's a great thing to post. That's very different from just assuming that something you have no knowledge about is pointless, though. We certainly see lots of pointless reinventing in tech, but if something appears to be a pointless reinvention of something you could find in 30 seconds with no prior knowledge, it nearly always isn't a pointless reinvention of that and you just don't know enough to understand what's different.
It is possible, but one thoughtful takedown by somebody who actually knows the field is worth more than an infinite number of uninformed googled results.
I think the dismissals come because wheelchair users are already painfully aware of the options.
Yes, there are different kinds of wheelchairs, there's no reason a premade, presized wheelchair has to cost thousands and they don't. The premade chairs certainly serve a need - for those who can sort of walk but need the chair to go distances (etc).
But the reason for custom wheelchairs is they are for people who spend all day, everyday in the chair. And that's where the need and the pain is greatest and so exhibiting a "ready made" chair just isn't going to impress them.
I am right handed, but overused it and switched to a left-handed mouse.
There are basically infinity right-handed mice, but basically zero left-handed mice, most of which are hedged ambidextrous mice.
so looking at office chairs and standing desks and all kinds of ergonomics oriented towards healthy sitting, it seems amazing that there isn't more competition for people who sit more than anyone.
Most left handed people I know (me included), use the mouse with the right hand. Might be a bubble though, but I never thought to get a left handed mouse, or left handed scissors or most left handed things. There's a few things that really don't work (I play my drumkit with hands reversed), but most things are fine.
I tried using a mouse in my left hand in left handed mode back in the day. Eventually, I got tired of changing the settings on shared computers at home/school, and I realized it wasn't any more or less hard to use the mouse with my right hand. Today, I use a right handed vertical mouse. Interestingly, I play guitar right handed, despite being inspired to play by Kurt Cobain. My girlfriend got me left handed scissors as a joke, but man, they actually feel better.
My sister used to use a neutral mouse, with her left hand, on the left side of the keyboard but in "normal" or "right handed mode". Now she has a laptop with a big touch pad in the middle.
I do what your sister used to do. (Left hand mouse use, buttons left at default).
Even game that way. Started using it that way as a kid, by the time I learned it was possible to switch the buttons that seemed less natural than leaving it as default.
Also made it much easier to use shared computers in school labs and the like.
Sounds like a nice application for 3D printing tbh. Take the electronics from a regular mouse and fit into a left-handed housing with a range of shapes/sizes etc available! Call it "second hand"
It seems like a massive pain though. Rebuilding a non-symmetrical mouse the other way would take electronics tinkering as well as 3d printing, and probably a ton of work to get all the connections and tolerances right.
I am left handed, and I use trackpads with my left hand, but I gave up on lefty mice years ago and use an ergonomic one right-handed.
I'd assume the electronics are very modular and probably just clip into place in a single unit. You do need a battery compartment or something though, and the buttons need to fit well. Wheel can come from donor mouse.
The Logitech G300s has been solid as a lefty. They used to be cheap enough that replacing them every couple of years (depending on usage) was feasible, but I'm not sure if the market has driven up prices since then.
I think its just how cheap / rudimentary the basic model look for 1K. Like it seems there's a viable Indochino / send measurement to Asia manufacture model and get bespoke product back for fraction of the cost. Or some sort of modular break down kit that you can take to a bike shop to tune to custom needs for less. I admire Jerry's effort, but I think people correctly sees $200 product that cost $1000 in US, and somehow it's considered "affordable".
Frames have crazy 100x markups and the market is dominated by a small number of companies. They interviewed people from Warby Parker (a newer, more inexpensive brand) and even they said they had to raise prices so they didn’t seem like knock-offs.
I haven't seen anyone pointing to an actual equivalent product available for $200 with shipping. The collapsible medical chairs I've seen when searching are not equivalent devices, they're heavier, more tiring and less durable and comfortable than the kind of chair in the article. This type of chair is semi-custom made to fit the user so they don't injure themselves or have unnecessary extra medical issues from using a chair all day and out in the world.
I don't think/know there's equivalent manufacturer over seas, just insinuations it could probably be done much cheaper over seas, customization included. High performance light weight wheel chair "feels" like there's a lot of overlap with making bicycles and I find it hard to believe you can't find a shop in an East Asian bike factory that already has the machines and labourers with years of experience bending aluminum pipes to avoid amortizing capex costs. Dude wants Made In America, quick shipping time (which I wager is important) which is fine, but it's going look like a $200 product that cost $1000.
Shipping will eat labor savings alive for these. Their frames are rigid so you'd have to either ship them in huge boxes the slow way (terrible for a custom product like this [0]), air freight them (probably upwards of 300 dollars for the size? That's just a wild guess though) or ship them disassembled and take the durability hit that would require. If they were less customized to fit the user you could but it's not the product we're looking at so you can't make them in mass quantity and ship them to a warehouse in the US like you can with a lot of less custom products.
It's also far less like bikes than you're thinking. They have 5 major adjustments for a total of about 25k different configurations. And those don't seem to be majorly exclusive to each other either.
>Dude wants Made In America, quick shipping time (which I wager is important) which is fine, but it's going look like a $200 product that cost $1000.
We sorta have that with everything though, you can source direct from china for a fraction of the cost, but the often pay several multiples of the actual cost for someone else to import it and provide the level of support and QA you expect from products.
TW also makes a lot of bikes. The amount of parts and fabrication on these wheel chairs don't look close to a $1000 bike, but I don't know how much component costs for wheel chairs are. Again, speaking from ignorance, this looks like $200 of assemble at parts that can then be taken to a bike shop to tune up for another $100. IMO the disconnect is this looks like such a rudimentary/basic product and it's hard to see the value of US premium and then discover this is "budget" version.
In this case the OP is targeted towards people who are already familiar with this type of chair, so I can sorta understand why the reader who has only ever seen the hospital style chair is confused.
It's the lack of curiosity in not taking the small extra mental step of thinking "what niche does this clearly physically different product address?" that's the most galling/disappointing. Or having done the search and found very cheap alternatives thinking, "clearly the person setting up a business creating and with a partner that using these products daily missed that this already exists" immediately instead of looking at why JerryRigEverything might not be an idiot wasting his money.
There are forms of technology other than software, and wheelchairs are one of them. YCombinator has invested in dozens of medical device startups... including devices in the mobility category: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/trexo-robotics
I get it but the acting surprised feels condescending and annoying itself. Maybe I should have articulated that better. There are always ignorant people. Always. Take that opportunity to answer their questions and move on. Not this "I know right. gawd. youd think theyd know better..." come on man, that's just rude. Like of course, there are gonna be questions and confused people. Don't be condescending and act all surprised.
The hope is that it is a site full of thoughtful people who’ve done at least a couple difficult projects. For that sort of person, the first instinct should not be to try and invalidate a project based on a couple seconds of googling. We should know that sometimes the problem takes more than a couple seconds of research to get to the real problem statement.
It's not but the concept that there may be more than one sub-type of a product (here: manual wheelchairs and their subtypes: "medical" [0], transport, etc) because there are many different scenarios for using any product is a universally applicable idea. You don't have to know much to see the cheaper types, see that they're physically different and figure out that there's a reason for there to be different types.
It's an endemic problem in many fields but you see it a lot with programmers. It's the same class of cognitive bias that births ideas like "the law should be like a program, that would be much simpler" that were (still are?) big in tech circles. Lazy pattern matching and thinking that understanding one complex thing (programming) makes one automatically better at unrelated fields (complex manufacturing).
[0] The type most people are most familiar with, large wheels, collapsible, handles for assistance from others. Generally not used by people who are able to move under their own power.
[1] similar to "medical" but without the large back wheels so they're only mobile with another persons help or by scooting around using your feet.
I was curious so looked at a few power wheelchairs...It's wild how expensive they are, especially considering the advancements in electric mobility tech elsewhere. You'd think they'd share some components with e-scooters, e-bikes, or even electric cars – motors, batteries, controllers.
Are the powertrains and control systems in power wheelchairs really that specialised? Or is it another case of the medical device markup and regulatory hurdles driving up costs?
I'm a guy who has disassembled and reverse engineered a standard Jazzy power chair, and what I noticed was the attention to detail regarding failures. The chair is thoroughly designed to shut down at the slightest bit of trouble. There's some redundancy in things like the controller, where it used redundant hall effect sensors that were identical to the others, but ran in an inverted power profile, to detect any weirdness in the sensor outputs.
I ended up adding a long range remote control to it. A remote control power chair is fun to drive around. People do get a little concerned when they see a chair rolling around without a driver
Ya, I was expecting to see something not very impressive at that link, but was pleasantly surprised. My chair is about $7k and while this one doesn't look like it would work for me, it is definitely much better than the cheap hospital chairs.
For context - he has a ~9m sub youtube channel on phones that must be banking it. This is a side project that appears to be grown out of frustration of disabled wife & seeing the shitshow that wheelchair market is. Seems 10/10 wholesome to have this disrupted by someone that cares
> This is a side project that appears to be grown out of frustration of disabled wife & seeing the shitshow that wheelchair market is
While it is absolutely true that he cares, I think you are selling his long term plans short. The primary growth factor for the channel was reviewing phones with the repairability / endurance focus, but somewhat recently he expanded to topics such as plugging abandoned oil wells which are leaking methane and wheelchair mobility issues. From what I understand he has a couple similar things in the pipeline.
Thank you for pointing this out so clearly, I'd not thought about it this way before but this makes perfect sense in a "best of the worst" kind of way.
The BOM for this wheel chair is probably 200-300 of just wheels and bearings maybe more. People who say this can be bought for 200$ are completely out of touch. You can’t even buy a decent bike for much under a grad new and bikes have much better scale.
That’s a wholesome story. Hope the company stays employee owned for a long time. Seen too many companies which started like this but after exchanging a few hands (ie, ending up in the hands of grand children). It ends up getting scrapped for parts and sold to the highest bidder.
Went down a bit of a rabbit hole and found this industry guide to Taiwanese contract bike manufacturers:http://www.wheelgiant.com.tw/ebook/flib/2024TBS_%E6%95%B4%E6... If there was enough demand, I'm betting some of the companies in here could make quality wheelchairs real cheap.
There's a group of people in Australia who recycle bicycles into makeshift wheelchairs for people living in countries with inadequate healthcare. They pack flat and are assembled on-site.
When bikeshare and scooter was gaining traction, I was hoping some manufacturer would look into collapsible electronic wheel chair for mass transportation. Maybe stupid, but think a few 100 million dollars and 1000s of engineer hours would make a pretty sweet slick wheel chair scooter for short commutes.
Is it totally different? Bikes are made and adjusted for a huge variety of body types. I understand there are different needs for wheel chair users, but I would think some level of adjustment would be possible to accommodate most of those.
Old and new wars being fought with anti personnel mine and seeing the numbers of young and fit men and women losing limbs to uncaring political goals is disheartening reminder there well might be.
It did not occur to me that wheelchairs are this expensive. But then again they make fewer of them than bicycles and a bicycle you want to be on hundreds of days a year can start at that price and go up into car prices.
Resale value is important for wheelchairs. My dad had an electric one for about 8 months before he passed on, and the TCO was well under the price of all these alt concepts.
This pretty much embodies why I love hacker engineering. Solving hard problems by itself is fun, making peoples lives better in the process makes it really worthwhile.
I just watched a factory tour of this yesterday: https://youtu.be/oBId9w7NgAQ Seems like they are setting up a pretty fancy operation using their YouTube money. Pretty cool!
The stuff Zack and Cambry are doing seems like it can exist even without the YouTube channel, once it reaches a point of awareness in the community and becomes self-sustaining.
Most of the other YouTube products I see seem like they'd die quickly without a YouTube personality to prop them up. They aren't really filling gaps in the market, or doing something new, they're just slapping their name on something as a way to diversify their income sources. Some do seem to put a good amount of effort into helping with the design, or even work directly with the manufacturers, but they're entering crowded and well served spaces, where their primary differentiation is their YouTube channel. Fans are their target market, and I find it unlikely that most will grow beyond their audience. I don't see LTT becoming the next Craftsman, or MKBHD becoming the next Nike.
Zack started out with the knife, which was a play on his YouTube success, but the various wheelchair adjacent things he's made stepped it up considerably. Others could do the same. It makes sense to test the waters and make some mistakes on something small before shooting for the moon. Time will tell how it plays out for all of them.
If nothing else, having some of these examples could inspire kids to want to start businesses making stuff instead of just wanting to be YouTube famous.
These never made it further than "I'm buying this because I like MrBeast/Logan Paul/etc." at least as far as I can tell. These wheelchairs are supposed to become good enough that any regular disabled person that can't walk* will seriously consider them even without knowing who makes them.
*English isn't my first language, no idea what a proper inoffensive way to describe the target audience is. I mean no harm :)
I ordered a Beast Burger on Door Dash without having any clue it was a Mr Beast thing until it showed up and was heavily branded. I wanted a burger and figured I'd try something new. I had never really watched any Mr Beast videos at that point. For whatever reason, he is never recommended to me.
The seasoning was so strong it was a bit hard to eat. I assumed it was covering up for lower quality meat or something. I have no desire to order one again.
Those are not custom (typically come pre-sized) and are generally not very usable outdoors to get around other than short distances. Sometimes known as "hospital wheelchairs". For people with temporary injuries who are mostly taking time off from work it's fine.
This is a everyday wheelchair that people can use to get to somewhere a mile or two away and back, often used by people to get to work or around a university campus independently. It is custom made to your measurements: https://notawheelchair.com/pages/configurator
There are obvious COL differences between regions which can account for a huge part of that. There's a reason we lost our manufacturing base in the west to China.
Are the chairs you're speaking of customized? Are they using the components of a similar quality? That may be a component, as well.
My former girlfriend gets powered wheelchairs through the Ontario Disability Support Program, and I witnessed and learned that the whole thing is such a fraud.
Her powered chair was just over $20,000 and was a terrible piece of machinery. You were definitely not getting the "medical devices have to be reliable" premium. And any time the technician came out, we got a bill to forward to ODSP for thousands of dollars, even for the simplest fix.
And of course there was zero competition: there was one and exactly one vendor you could go to for this stuff. They were, of course, terrible with customer service, terrible with technician competence, and their products were consistently terrible.
I'm usually instantly skeptical of any tech startup that wants to airdrop into a problem space and disrupt things, but in this case, I'm 38,000% confident that there's something that can be done with this one.
>And of course there was zero competition: there was one and exactly one vendor you could go to for this stuff. They were, of course, terrible with customer service, terrible with technician competence, and their products were consistently terrible.
It's probably not a cost effective market to be in and getting a government monopoly is the only way to make it viable in the first place.
I have an Ontarian optometrist in the immediate family. I helped them set up a very tangled and innefficient ODSP claims process. It's a terribly, terribly managed program. I'm not sure if the OP has to pay and be reimbursed, but I wouldn't be surprised. That family member has to wait upwards of a year sometimes to be reimbursed, occaisionnaly they wait that much time only to be refused because of a "problem" which is not detailed anyways, so the business has to waste time to figure out problems. All the while, they are in the hole for that money.
Hopefully someone does the same thing for rollators (walking frames). I bought a few second-hand for my mum and they were all had disgustingly terrible usability. Brakes that didn't work properly (huge safety issue). Parts poking out (and flying brake-lines) that would catch on everything, or cause mum problems.
One sharp bit at the wheels damaged the skin at her ankle and she couldn't do anything for weeks to recover. It was a very serious problem caused by thoughtless design.
And we are in New Zealand which is better than many places. It is terrible watching people struggle in other countries (or lack access to the simplest requirement).
Good usability is hard enough to find for the smart and strong.
It is extremely hard to find for the weak and infirm. Especially when supplied through government services!
Finding her a wheelchair was hard because she is tiny and needed a teen sized one. But everything available second-hand or through our social services was designed for heavier people with wide arses (imported chairs?). Luckily found a wheelchair manufacturer in my city that had one designed for a teen on special (end-of-line - not manufacturing standard wheelchairs any more - changing to focus on expensive specialist sports chairs).
I have no knowledge of this specific product area but wondering what aspect of the wheelchair in the photo results in this seemingly high cost? (to note, I understand that this is still far cheaper than other wheelchairs). Is it the material cost? It looks like it's just a few pipes, a cushion, and a pair of wheels. About the same build as a basic bicycle.
Mostly the machines the factory uses. You can cut tubes by hand and drill those holes, but the machines are more accurate and faster. However those machines will cost you in the million range each in some cases. (the $1000 Chinese versions for home use are kits that will cost you $10k to make accurate and the quality means they will wear out fast so while find for building a couple they are more expensive than the million dollar machines in the long run) That investment needs to be amortized across whatever you build and wheelchairs are not high volume.
You can't go with cheaper less flexible machines either because each wheelchair needs to be somewhat custom fit. That in turn means you need to the more expensive machines instead of simple jigs that. They also need someone to program the machines for your custom fit (or software to create that program)
Fascinating. I assumed that most manufacturing machines can be reconfigured to build anything that machine can handle physically (i.e. not a particularly specialized machine) and, therefore, can be bought for cheap, or used. Coming from software I don't have a frame of reference for manufacturing cost.
It's a relatively small market so the up front capital and ongoing labor costs are probably pretty restrictive. Those parts are more expensive than you realize though with the wheels being the most expensive part if I had to wager, they're critical, specialized, and need to stand up to a lot of abuse.
I toured the Trek factory when they still made them in the US. They'd already drunk from the font of Goldratt wrt to Just in Time, but they would set up each day pretty much to make one model of bicycle for the whole day. Parts, tooling, paint booth, everything. The only thing that changed was sizes, and a model of bike tends to have the same geometries across all sizes. 78º angle here, 99º angle there. That may not be optimal for the rider but it's how you keep prices down and keep product lines from getting confusing.
If that's true of wheelchairs, you can get some economies of scale even if sizes vary. If it's not, then maybe that's one of the things we should tackle.
The bend angle of the tube that forms the seat support down to the legs seems like one of their major adjustment points for comfort and efficiency so I don't think you could have a similar setup. These are essentially semi-custom not a simple size based product like a bike. The extra adjustments are important because the users are in them many more hours a day so small problems can cause long term issues.
Their configurator has a very good model of what the chair will look like and you can see just how many knobs you can tweak and how that requires changing the core layout of the frame in a way that makes the kind of sizing system just not feasible. Scroll down on the Frame page to get to the fit sliders.
edit: Did the math and there's something like 25k different configurations they're selling before accounting for paint colors, just in the frame measurements. Granted, that's not accounting for the improbability or incompatibility of some parameter sets but that's still going to be a couple thousand different configs to build and stock. It doesn't work like a bike.
On a bike you have a little bit of flexibility due to the way the seat post works. Both in how the seat attaches and adding curves to the post, particularly for triathletes who like to favor their hamstrings over their quads, and sit considerably farther forward than any 'normal' cyclist would.
I know I've seen wheelchairs where the back was a tube that went into a tube. If you put the curve in the replaceable part you get more adjustment but less support. Generally the tolerances on bikes are very tight and medical equipment seems to be all over the place.
First, have you purchased a bicycle? "High quality" bicycles start at $1,000. (quality dimensions = weight, comfort, durability, flexibility)
Second, small scale manufacturing is expensive.
Third, large-scale manufactured wheelchairs have the same problem as the rest of the medical equipment world: prices are subsidized/inflated by insurance.
Are you looking at "hospital" style wheelchairs, or dedicated use wheelchairs? The difference is huge. Those hospital style, one size fits all chairs are HEAVY, clunky, slow, and tire you out very easily if you don't have someone pushing you. Someone with a spinal cord injury or a variety of mobility constrants would be better off in a dedicated chair like this as they are lighter (sub 20lbs), designed to fit to the user, and offer more comfort which combats things like skin wounds.
If you look at wheelchairs from companies like TiLite or Quickie, you are starting off at almost double this price before any customization (rims, guards, etc). $1000 all in for a dedicated wheelchair is fantastic.
The weight of a bike or a wheelchair matters a lot less when you're at low speeds on level terrain without many turns, which describes a hospital to a T - they have to be able to get gurneys through these spaces, and if you think a wheelchair is heavy then brother have I got news for you.
But the moment you go outside now you're dealing with ramps and hills.
I'm 38, more fit than most, I had to interact with my father-in-law's wheelchair this weekend for the first time. He is 73 and expected to travel with it everywhere, lifting it in and out of some kind of a vehicle. I would _very_ much describe it as heavy, especially in the context of a 70+ (maybe 60+, maybe 50+) year old individual. I'm wondering what the news is.
You can get perfectly viable inexpensive bicycles as well - but if you were expecting to replace ALL of your other vehicle transport with a bike would you start by looking at ones with welded steel frames? The classic 80s Schwinn 10-speed that weighs in at 40 pounds but is pretty indestructible?
> When I first heard about this, it sounded awesome and a bit far-fetched. It’s hard to find a pair of quality wheelchair wheels for less than $500. Same with a rigid backrest. How were they going to offer both, plus a custom wheelchair frame without compromising on quality?
I have no idea though. Maybe there are sort of like… different classes of wheelchair, and they are trying to make not-terrible one? Like technically $5 headphones exist but not from a hobbyist point of view.
Insurance only pays for one chair every 8 years (IIRC, my aunt who was in a wheelchair died a few years back and so now I no longer have family conversations about these details). The ability to get custom chairs for different purposes would be nice. My aunt had an off road wheelchair for using around the yard, back when she could walk around the house (with a cane), but the doctor warned her she would be full time in a wheelchair around the house before the next time insurance would buy her one. So if you can get the expensive wheel chair for around the yard and afford to buy without insurance a second better suited for around the house that would be useful.
In the middle of the article they say that an insurance-approved wheelchair will tend to cost the patient $1000 after insurance. They're aiming for private purchase at the same price.
> What am I missing in this $1K “affordable” wheelchair idea?
Truckloads of paperwork, at least in the EU. Wheelchairs are regulated as "medical devices" since 2017, which does make sense given that people tend to spend a large portion of their day sitting in them and that they tend to be on the upper end of the body weight distribution... but the certifications make them much more expensive than they'd need to be, and they also prevent competition from entering the market.
Additionally, laws of scale apply here as well. Wheelchairs are a pretty bespoke, small scale industry - outside of large orders from civil protection agencies to be used in mass evacuation scenarios (the German THW and Red Cross for example have stockpiles, mostly used in foreign aid/crisis response and WW2-era bomb evacuations), every user has their own specific needs, making mass production all but infeasible.
There are many different classes of wheelchair. Most of the really cheap versions are medical chairs for people who can't move on their own for whatever reason, think the kind you see at hospitals or nursing homes for wheeling people around. This type is for people who can't walk but can still sit upright on their own and can move the wheelchair on their own. They're lighter, rigid and have higher efficiency than the medical type. They're also semi custom or adjustable to fit the user better than the temp/medical kind.
No, there are much better under-$200 bikes on craigslist. :P Get a nice $100 bike from the early 80s and pay a bike store for a tuneup, and you've got a pretty useful bike to ride on all day; gotta friction shift though. Not a lot of great looking wheelchairs on craigslist near me though.
When our kids were growing quickly, we went through a number of sub-$300 bikes, both new and gifted by family. I ended up doing about one repair every two weeks, including broken derailleurs, junky brakes, jammed wheels, you name it. And our kids did not abuse those bikes.
I ended up buying a bike stand and a basic toolkit just so I could fix those bikes quickly and get the kids back outside. The parts on those bikes were absolute garbage and the reliability was zero.
Meanwhile I have a medium/high-end mountain bike from 1997 that still has some original parts on it, despite having seen time as a daily commuter and a trail bike.
A good thing to look at is resale value. Around here, you can resell a $1200 mountain bike for a good price. But you'd lucky to get much for a $800 bike.
I ride a lot, and am happy to ride cheap bikes, but I probably wouldn't ride a $200 Amazon or Walmart bike for rides longer than 30-40 miles without swapping the saddle, which would add anywhere from $40 to $150.
$200 is a reasonable price for a bicycle-shaped garage decoration which gets ridden for 30 minutes per month, which is indeed all that many people want out of a bicycle. Something practical for a 15 minute one-way commute that you ride every day is more like $500 new. Something which you could spend all day every day on would be a lot more.
The question was would you spend that on a device you spend 8+hrs in each day, which is something people often ignore.
This is a device you _live_ in. This is someone's mobility and independence you're talking about. Not a "I spend 30 minutes to an hour a day riding", or a "I commute to work on this" but instead "I use this to enjoy life".
Are there open source community for all things biomedical devices ? even partial exoskeleton (not joking, looking for practical attempts to help elders)
Most of this stuff is still a bit too expensive for DIY, Festool have an ExoActive exoskeleton that might be repurposable - though I think it's designed mostly for holding weight above the head.
There is the 'body braid' that is probably more suited for the tasks that the elderly have trouble with.
>> It’s mesmerizing to watch. When the laser is done cutting, sometimes the leftover material just falls out, but sometimes it stays in place.
Please be very careful when watching an industrial laser, particularly one cutting shiny metal. I would honestly support any reg that puts hard barriers between eyeballs and running laser equipment. Invest in a good camera and watch the show on a screen.
It is enclosed. They show a picture later and there's a green safety window to view the work piece in the machine, that material will be designed to block whatever wavelength of light the laser is using (most likely IR, and what do you know safety glasses for the IR bands are mostly green).
Hah, now it makes more sense why Jerry was being so active on GoodTimesWithScar Twitter feed. Scar is also a wheelchair user, but is mostly famous for his YouTube landscaping videos.
Nice to see this, Jerry is not just another YouTuber grifter, he's a maker and has been involved building for his wife for a while.
Meh, lots of people call him Jerry for a while now. I know you're not aware because you're not a fan and just wants to one up on HN.
He said already he chose Jerry in honor of his grandfather who was a fixer. On an interview with MKBHD (btw, I know MKBHD is not literally that guy's name) he said he just rolls with it when someone calls him Jerry.
So I follow some disability activists and it's kinda depressing just how hostile society is and people are to people with disabilities. And this crops up everywhere.
So for wheelchairs, for example, airlines routinely damage or destroy or lose wheelchairs, like 1000+ a month [1]. You need to be aware that wheelchairs typically need to be customized for the user. You typically can't just buy a wheelchair on Amazon and you're good to go. Using a replacement wheelchair can represent a significant safety risk.
Only now is the DoT starting to take action to curb this [2]. But what other group of people would such reckless disregard and gross negligence be tolerated for?
We just had Hurricane Helene wreak havoc through Appalachia. Usually in these situations people on the outside will criticize those who didn't evacuate. This happened in Katrina too. But you know who often can't evacuate? Disabled people.
Look at our response to Covid. The powers-that-be wanted everyone to get back to work and be busy worker bees that could once again produce value that would be exploited. So isolation restrictions were loosened. We capitulated to the irrational and completely self-centered whims of antivaxxers. There was a war on mask mandates. This went so far in some places as to literally ban masks [3].
This is all despite some people being immunocompromised and Covid never going away. We're essentially decided those people can just die.
But beyond them, you know what else Covid was? A mass disabling event. I'm talking about long Covid. This affects probably millions of people. These once healthy people are going to learn the hard way what the wanton disregard for disabled people looks like.
Anyway, I applaud efforts like cheaper and faster to produce wheelchairs. They won't suit everyone but we shouldn't tolerate a situation where it might take months for someone to get a wheelchair, But can we stop destroying wheelchairs too?
You should do some research into wheelchairs and the differences in designs, materials, and life times to better understand why the $1000 price tag on what the company is offering is actually incredible. This is for someone who has a spinal cord injury and has to be in a chair fulltime, not those hospital style chairs you are probably thinking of.
before clicking the link, I thought it would be something along the lines of a Dean Kamen iBOT chair. Seems like a lot of money for a basic wheelchair.
These aren't basic wheelchairs like at the hospital imo. They are the wheelchairs that someone is going to spend their entire day/life in and use for mobility. Huge difference I think. It's also heavily customizable https://notawheelchair.com/pages/configurator
That's really cool. But I also notice that when I go to thrift stores in my area that there are often wheelchairs available for $25 or less. Similar for walkers and other mobility devices that tend to be really expensive new.
This is why reading comments before contributing to the conversation is useful. There are already several comments outlining why a $25 wheelchair, especially a used one found at thrift stores, isn't comparable. Build quality, weight, fit, convenience, portability - all of these are reasons to spend more on a wheelchair.
We don't question why different computers are more expensive than others even though they all do the same job. We don't question why one bike costs more than another despite using the same mechanism for propulsion. Wheelchairs are another good with varying levels of quality at different price points. It's arguably more important for quality goods to be accessible because for many, they're living in these things constantly.
The alibaba ones are almost like disposable lower quality solutions, have textile backs, and are foldable, etc. which also have their places and uses eg. after disasters, mass depoyment, handout at hospitals as temporary solutions.
The product in the linked article is clearly a higher quality item intended for longer term use by a single person.
1k$ is the cost of a decent office work-chair from any well-established low-to-medium volume vendor, as context. For a small shop like this it is an okay price, abeit the sum being a lot for many especialy in a new situation where they are forced to a wheelchair. Mass production could probably drive it down a lot, but you need volume for that.
ps: with volume you can also better amortize the engineering costs, which can be significant even for stuff looking simple and easy to do for those who did not do it yet... or did (even significant, core) parts of the product development in a large established firm. I also started a product development for simple looking stuff that turned out to be a lot lot more work when not being done only as a hack/PoC, but developed to a product. I abandoned the product before going for the official certifications (FCC, CE, etc.). For medical equipment they probably also need to meet regulations.
This is like saying a $30 display off Aliexpress is better than a $1000 display from a high quality brand. The only metric it will be better on will be the price, everything else will be a ridiculous comparison.
Shipping makes them pretty consistently $116ish/piece until you hit negotiated shipping numbers.
They're also not the kind of wheelchair people are looking for if they're self mobile which is the kind of chair the article is reporting on. Those are made lighter and more resilient to stand up to being used by one person out in the world rolling themselves around.
Custom fit lightweight wheelchairs are expensive. My Ti-Lite (one of the most popular lightweight chair brands) Aero Z starts at $3k and goes up quickly with wheels and backrest and casters and various other options that I need for sitting 16 hours a day without creating more problems. Insurance covers this for me every 5 years, but of course that's not a luxury every one has. Most plans don't cover DME 100%.
What Zack and Cambry are doing is great.
(edit) I’d like to add that I think part of being able to drive costs down is that they’re not offering these via insurance so they sidestep the need for FDA approval to market it as a medical device (hence the company name), CMS approval and HCPCS coding and all the regulatory costs that come with that.
Now don't get me started on power wheelchair cost...
It's odd seeing the number of dismissive comments missing that there are whole categories of wheelchairs for different purposes. It's like asking why XPSs exist when there are Chromebooks, something most people commenting here would immediately realize as a silly question because they suit different needs and functions but the idea doesn't come up because it's an unfamiliar problem.
That sort of “I googled for 30 seconds, and found a cheaper option, why does this project exist” type response is anti-curiosity and anti-learning.
It is possible that the YouTuber guy is a total idiot and decided to make a $1000 wheelchair instead of buying a $200 one, but that shouldn’t be a default assumption, haha.
I couldn’t upvote this enough. A lot of drive-by cynicism I see these days is really just a lack of curiosity and bad faith assumptions (this guy must be an idiot, etc.).
I see it a lot in practice especially when discussing early-stage business ideas.
> A lot of drive-by cynicism I see these days is really just a lack of curiosity and bad faith assumptions (this guy must be an idiot, etc.).
You're talking if guys pitching overpriced and underquality gear is completely unheard of, or if flawed business ideas are a rare occurrence.
I get it, support and enthusiasm is always nice to have. But if you descend into the real world you'll see that more often than not you'll see a mix of fraud and overconfident people pitching undercooked ideas that they under deliver, and you're criticizing those who might as well have experienced that first-hand for a few times.
There's another choice, though: instead of being a drive-by cynic, just move on and don't comment.
It's not like these people are providing a valuable service, steering everyone away from the dumb scams. They're just pattern matching and assuming everything they doesn't seem to make sense (in their generally not-well-informed opinion) must be bad.
It's unnecessary, and is noise just as often as it's not.
Well, I guess since I disagree with you, I must be an inhabitant of this non-real world. Dang, I wish I’d thought to deem myself the arbiter of reality.
But from here, floating in the imaginary clouds, the error of the cynics was pretty easy to spot. It was that there are different types of wheelchairs and the cynics were just googling up the bargain-basement mass produced ones. I guess in the real world everything (including medical devices) is one-size-fits-all?
> anti-curiosity and anti-learning
You nailed it. If I could go a bit deeper, I think the drive-by cynicism comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of people.
Statistically, you are probably not significantly smarter or dumber than most people you meet. In other words, someone who has spent months or years on a problem probably knows more about it than you do if you’re just now reading about it. So if someone with more experience is doing something you think is dumb, your first reaction should be to ask why rather than dismiss.
Indeed. If I google for 30 seconds, and see a stark contradiction with what somebody offers, I try not to conclude that that the guy in question is a fool. This is always possible, but rarely true.
Instead I conclude that likely my understanding is lacking, and maybe educating myself a little bit would be beneficial. Either I find out something new and potentially useful about the world, or finally see through a swindle and understand how it works, which is always a good skill to exercise.
>It is possible that the YouTuber guy is a total idiot and decided to make a $1000 wheelchair instead of buying a $200 one, but that shouldn’t be a default assumption, haha.
Seems insane to assume that but we see it in tech all the time where someone unknowingly spends a ton of money on reinventing something that already exists.
If you have some actual knowledge about a thing and can explain why it's pointless and already existed then that's a great thing to post. That's very different from just assuming that something you have no knowledge about is pointless, though. We certainly see lots of pointless reinventing in tech, but if something appears to be a pointless reinvention of something you could find in 30 seconds with no prior knowledge, it nearly always isn't a pointless reinvention of that and you just don't know enough to understand what's different.
It is possible, but one thoughtful takedown by somebody who actually knows the field is worth more than an infinite number of uninformed googled results.
I think the dismissals come because wheelchair users are already painfully aware of the options.
Yes, there are different kinds of wheelchairs, there's no reason a premade, presized wheelchair has to cost thousands and they don't. The premade chairs certainly serve a need - for those who can sort of walk but need the chair to go distances (etc).
But the reason for custom wheelchairs is they are for people who spend all day, everyday in the chair. And that's where the need and the pain is greatest and so exhibiting a "ready made" chair just isn't going to impress them.
I sort of think of left-handed people.
I am right handed, but overused it and switched to a left-handed mouse.
There are basically infinity right-handed mice, but basically zero left-handed mice, most of which are hedged ambidextrous mice.
so looking at office chairs and standing desks and all kinds of ergonomics oriented towards healthy sitting, it seems amazing that there isn't more competition for people who sit more than anyone.
Most left handed people I know (me included), use the mouse with the right hand. Might be a bubble though, but I never thought to get a left handed mouse, or left handed scissors or most left handed things. There's a few things that really don't work (I play my drumkit with hands reversed), but most things are fine.
I tried using a mouse in my left hand in left handed mode back in the day. Eventually, I got tired of changing the settings on shared computers at home/school, and I realized it wasn't any more or less hard to use the mouse with my right hand. Today, I use a right handed vertical mouse. Interestingly, I play guitar right handed, despite being inspired to play by Kurt Cobain. My girlfriend got me left handed scissors as a joke, but man, they actually feel better.
My sister used to use a neutral mouse, with her left hand, on the left side of the keyboard but in "normal" or "right handed mode". Now she has a laptop with a big touch pad in the middle.
I do what your sister used to do. (Left hand mouse use, buttons left at default).
Even game that way. Started using it that way as a kid, by the time I learned it was possible to switch the buttons that seemed less natural than leaving it as default.
Also made it much easier to use shared computers in school labs and the like.
A lot of left-handed people are actually cross-dominant or selectively ambidextrous.
I felt comfortable with "neutral" mouses that aren't shaped right or left that I could use either with right or left hand
Sounds like a nice application for 3D printing tbh. Take the electronics from a regular mouse and fit into a left-handed housing with a range of shapes/sizes etc available! Call it "second hand"
At least one guy on reddit did this and is still sending out the files for people who ask: https://old.reddit.com/r/MouseReview/comments/enxzgg/lefty_g...
It seems like a massive pain though. Rebuilding a non-symmetrical mouse the other way would take electronics tinkering as well as 3d printing, and probably a ton of work to get all the connections and tolerances right.
I am left handed, and I use trackpads with my left hand, but I gave up on lefty mice years ago and use an ergonomic one right-handed.
I'd assume the electronics are very modular and probably just clip into place in a single unit. You do need a battery compartment or something though, and the buttons need to fit well. Wheel can come from donor mouse.
I switched to an Apple Trackpad and it basically cured my wrist issues that I was experiencing.
I use dual mice for variety sake.
The Logitech G300s has been solid as a lefty. They used to be cheap enough that replacing them every couple of years (depending on usage) was feasible, but I'm not sure if the market has driven up prices since then.
I think its just how cheap / rudimentary the basic model look for 1K. Like it seems there's a viable Indochino / send measurement to Asia manufacture model and get bespoke product back for fraction of the cost. Or some sort of modular break down kit that you can take to a bike shop to tune to custom needs for less. I admire Jerry's effort, but I think people correctly sees $200 product that cost $1000 in US, and somehow it's considered "affordable".
I don’t know anything about wheelchairs, but there’s a similar very high-margin market for eyeglasses. Freakonomics did a podcast about it:
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-do-your-eyeglasses-cost...
Frames have crazy 100x markups and the market is dominated by a small number of companies. They interviewed people from Warby Parker (a newer, more inexpensive brand) and even they said they had to raise prices so they didn’t seem like knock-offs.
I haven't seen anyone pointing to an actual equivalent product available for $200 with shipping. The collapsible medical chairs I've seen when searching are not equivalent devices, they're heavier, more tiring and less durable and comfortable than the kind of chair in the article. This type of chair is semi-custom made to fit the user so they don't injure themselves or have unnecessary extra medical issues from using a chair all day and out in the world.
I don't think/know there's equivalent manufacturer over seas, just insinuations it could probably be done much cheaper over seas, customization included. High performance light weight wheel chair "feels" like there's a lot of overlap with making bicycles and I find it hard to believe you can't find a shop in an East Asian bike factory that already has the machines and labourers with years of experience bending aluminum pipes to avoid amortizing capex costs. Dude wants Made In America, quick shipping time (which I wager is important) which is fine, but it's going look like a $200 product that cost $1000.
Shipping will eat labor savings alive for these. Their frames are rigid so you'd have to either ship them in huge boxes the slow way (terrible for a custom product like this [0]), air freight them (probably upwards of 300 dollars for the size? That's just a wild guess though) or ship them disassembled and take the durability hit that would require. If they were less customized to fit the user you could but it's not the product we're looking at so you can't make them in mass quantity and ship them to a warehouse in the US like you can with a lot of less custom products.
It's also far less like bikes than you're thinking. They have 5 major adjustments for a total of about 25k different configurations. And those don't seem to be majorly exclusive to each other either.
[0] Check out the number of tweaks available in their configurator: https://notawheelchair.com/pages/configurator
>Dude wants Made In America, quick shipping time (which I wager is important) which is fine, but it's going look like a $200 product that cost $1000.
We sorta have that with everything though, you can source direct from china for a fraction of the cost, but the often pay several multiples of the actual cost for someone else to import it and provide the level of support and QA you expect from products.
TW also makes a lot of bikes. The amount of parts and fabrication on these wheel chairs don't look close to a $1000 bike, but I don't know how much component costs for wheel chairs are. Again, speaking from ignorance, this looks like $200 of assemble at parts that can then be taken to a bike shop to tune up for another $100. IMO the disconnect is this looks like such a rudimentary/basic product and it's hard to see the value of US premium and then discover this is "budget" version.
>The amount of parts and fabrication on these wheel chairs don't look close to a $1000 bike
Only because bikes are made up of commodity parts from many suppliers which drive the costs down, whereas this is mostly bespoke.
It is hilarious that people keep throwing out prices of $200 or $500, when $200 might get you close to the cost of one of the wheels on this.
>IMO the disconnect is this looks like such a rudimentary/basic product
Only to someone that's not familiar with what this is and what its competitors are.
In this case the OP is targeted towards people who are already familiar with this type of chair, so I can sorta understand why the reader who has only ever seen the hospital style chair is confused.
It's the lack of curiosity in not taking the small extra mental step of thinking "what niche does this clearly physically different product address?" that's the most galling/disappointing. Or having done the search and found very cheap alternatives thinking, "clearly the person setting up a business creating and with a partner that using these products daily missed that this already exists" immediately instead of looking at why JerryRigEverything might not be an idiot wasting his money.
It's not odd because as you pointed out this is a tech oriented site and not a wheel chair oriented site.
There are forms of technology other than software, and wheelchairs are one of them. YCombinator has invested in dozens of medical device startups... including devices in the mobility category: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/trexo-robotics
You expect too much of people.
Please stop. These cynical drive-by comments add nothing to the discussion.
I get it but the acting surprised feels condescending and annoying itself. Maybe I should have articulated that better. There are always ignorant people. Always. Take that opportunity to answer their questions and move on. Not this "I know right. gawd. youd think theyd know better..." come on man, that's just rude. Like of course, there are gonna be questions and confused people. Don't be condescending and act all surprised.
The hope is that it is a site full of thoughtful people who’ve done at least a couple difficult projects. For that sort of person, the first instinct should not be to try and invalidate a project based on a couple seconds of googling. We should know that sometimes the problem takes more than a couple seconds of research to get to the real problem statement.
[flagged]
It's not but the concept that there may be more than one sub-type of a product (here: manual wheelchairs and their subtypes: "medical" [0], transport, etc) because there are many different scenarios for using any product is a universally applicable idea. You don't have to know much to see the cheaper types, see that they're physically different and figure out that there's a reason for there to be different types.
It's an endemic problem in many fields but you see it a lot with programmers. It's the same class of cognitive bias that births ideas like "the law should be like a program, that would be much simpler" that were (still are?) big in tech circles. Lazy pattern matching and thinking that understanding one complex thing (programming) makes one automatically better at unrelated fields (complex manufacturing).
[0] The type most people are most familiar with, large wheels, collapsible, handles for assistance from others. Generally not used by people who are able to move under their own power.
[1] similar to "medical" but without the large back wheels so they're only mobile with another persons help or by scooting around using your feet.
I was curious so looked at a few power wheelchairs...It's wild how expensive they are, especially considering the advancements in electric mobility tech elsewhere. You'd think they'd share some components with e-scooters, e-bikes, or even electric cars – motors, batteries, controllers.
Are the powertrains and control systems in power wheelchairs really that specialised? Or is it another case of the medical device markup and regulatory hurdles driving up costs?
I'm a guy who has disassembled and reverse engineered a standard Jazzy power chair, and what I noticed was the attention to detail regarding failures. The chair is thoroughly designed to shut down at the slightest bit of trouble. There's some redundancy in things like the controller, where it used redundant hall effect sensors that were identical to the others, but ran in an inverted power profile, to detect any weirdness in the sensor outputs.
I ended up adding a long range remote control to it. A remote control power chair is fun to drive around. People do get a little concerned when they see a chair rolling around without a driver
Ya, I was expecting to see something not very impressive at that link, but was pleasantly surprised. My chair is about $7k and while this one doesn't look like it would work for me, it is definitely much better than the cheap hospital chairs.
Hey, would you get started on power wheelchair costs? Inquiring minds would like to learn more.
Anything medical becomes a licensing nightmare. With how expensive power wheelchairs get I’m shocked they don’t come with a flight box.
For context - he has a ~9m sub youtube channel on phones that must be banking it. This is a side project that appears to be grown out of frustration of disabled wife & seeing the shitshow that wheelchair market is. Seems 10/10 wholesome to have this disrupted by someone that cares
> This is a side project that appears to be grown out of frustration of disabled wife & seeing the shitshow that wheelchair market is
While it is absolutely true that he cares, I think you are selling his long term plans short. The primary growth factor for the channel was reviewing phones with the repairability / endurance focus, but somewhat recently he expanded to topics such as plugging abandoned oil wells which are leaking methane and wheelchair mobility issues. From what I understand he has a couple similar things in the pipeline.
Didn't he also help get some libraries built in Kenya?
I think so: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7R71uDa3DNw
i think he's a better than average presenter for a youtube channel. I did like his huge bunker videos
my biggest annoyance is his plugging or advertising stuff too obviously
Obvious advertising is the most ethical kind.
Thank you for pointing this out so clearly, I'd not thought about it this way before but this makes perfect sense in a "best of the worst" kind of way.
I'll take his transparent advertising over "native" ads any day.
Man has to pay bills
Let's not forget that he also shoots stuff like the cybertruck for fun, which is awesome.
The BOM for this wheel chair is probably 200-300 of just wheels and bearings maybe more. People who say this can be bought for 200$ are completely out of touch. You can’t even buy a decent bike for much under a grad new and bikes have much better scale.
That’s a wholesome story. Hope the company stays employee owned for a long time. Seen too many companies which started like this but after exchanging a few hands (ie, ending up in the hands of grand children). It ends up getting scrapped for parts and sold to the highest bidder.
Went down a bit of a rabbit hole and found this industry guide to Taiwanese contract bike manufacturers:http://www.wheelgiant.com.tw/ebook/flib/2024TBS_%E6%95%B4%E6... If there was enough demand, I'm betting some of the companies in here could make quality wheelchairs real cheap.
There's a group of people in Australia who recycle bicycles into makeshift wheelchairs for people living in countries with inadequate healthcare. They pack flat and are assembled on-site.
https://wheelchairtrust.org.au/
When bikeshare and scooter was gaining traction, I was hoping some manufacturer would look into collapsible electronic wheel chair for mass transportation. Maybe stupid, but think a few 100 million dollars and 1000s of engineer hours would make a pretty sweet slick wheel chair scooter for short commutes.
Each wheelchair is custom so it's totally different than other products.
Is it totally different? Bikes are made and adjusted for a huge variety of body types. I understand there are different needs for wheel chair users, but I would think some level of adjustment would be possible to accommodate most of those.
> if there was enough demand
I really hope there truly isn't in a real sense.
Old and new wars being fought with anti personnel mine and seeing the numbers of young and fit men and women losing limbs to uncaring political goals is disheartening reminder there well might be.
It did not occur to me that wheelchairs are this expensive. But then again they make fewer of them than bicycles and a bicycle you want to be on hundreds of days a year can start at that price and go up into car prices.
It would be nice to see a little more of this in the world. Thank you Cambry and Zack Nelson.
Resale value is important for wheelchairs. My dad had an electric one for about 8 months before he passed on, and the TCO was well under the price of all these alt concepts.
This pretty much embodies why I love hacker engineering. Solving hard problems by itself is fun, making peoples lives better in the process makes it really worthwhile.
I just watched a factory tour of this yesterday: https://youtu.be/oBId9w7NgAQ Seems like they are setting up a pretty fancy operation using their YouTube money. Pretty cool!
It's cool how they get both capital and distribution from their YouTube channel. Are there any other "real" business started from YouTube like this?
The stuff Zack and Cambry are doing seems like it can exist even without the YouTube channel, once it reaches a point of awareness in the community and becomes self-sustaining.
Most of the other YouTube products I see seem like they'd die quickly without a YouTube personality to prop them up. They aren't really filling gaps in the market, or doing something new, they're just slapping their name on something as a way to diversify their income sources. Some do seem to put a good amount of effort into helping with the design, or even work directly with the manufacturers, but they're entering crowded and well served spaces, where their primary differentiation is their YouTube channel. Fans are their target market, and I find it unlikely that most will grow beyond their audience. I don't see LTT becoming the next Craftsman, or MKBHD becoming the next Nike.
Zack started out with the knife, which was a play on his YouTube success, but the various wheelchair adjacent things he's made stepped it up considerably. Others could do the same. It makes sense to test the waters and make some mistakes on something small before shooting for the moon. Time will tell how it plays out for all of them.
If nothing else, having some of these examples could inspire kids to want to start businesses making stuff instead of just wanting to be YouTube famous.
Youtuber Mark Rober started CrunchLabs from his youtube channel.
for better or worse the entire Mr Beast empire and, to an extent, Logan Paul and his ventures (Prime, etc)
These never made it further than "I'm buying this because I like MrBeast/Logan Paul/etc." at least as far as I can tell. These wheelchairs are supposed to become good enough that any regular disabled person that can't walk* will seriously consider them even without knowing who makes them.
*English isn't my first language, no idea what a proper inoffensive way to describe the target audience is. I mean no harm :)
I ordered a Beast Burger on Door Dash without having any clue it was a Mr Beast thing until it showed up and was heavily branded. I wanted a burger and figured I'd try something new. I had never really watched any Mr Beast videos at that point. For whatever reason, he is never recommended to me.
The seasoning was so strong it was a bit hard to eat. I assumed it was covering up for lower quality meat or something. I have no desire to order one again.
Mr Beast burgers werent even a real restaurant. Theyre just faceless ghost kitchens with a mrbeast sticker slapped on top.
1k for a wheelchair is unbelievable for me. In Bangladesh they cost about 7 to 9 thousands taka which is equivalent 60 to 100 USD. I don't understand.
Those are not custom (typically come pre-sized) and are generally not very usable outdoors to get around other than short distances. Sometimes known as "hospital wheelchairs". For people with temporary injuries who are mostly taking time off from work it's fine.
This is a everyday wheelchair that people can use to get to somewhere a mile or two away and back, often used by people to get to work or around a university campus independently. It is custom made to your measurements: https://notawheelchair.com/pages/configurator
https://www.sammcintosh.com/blog/wheelchairtypes0620
There are obvious COL differences between regions which can account for a huge part of that. There's a reason we lost our manufacturing base in the west to China.
Are the chairs you're speaking of customized? Are they using the components of a similar quality? That may be a component, as well.
>I don't understand.
Almost completely different products.
My former girlfriend gets powered wheelchairs through the Ontario Disability Support Program, and I witnessed and learned that the whole thing is such a fraud.
Her powered chair was just over $20,000 and was a terrible piece of machinery. You were definitely not getting the "medical devices have to be reliable" premium. And any time the technician came out, we got a bill to forward to ODSP for thousands of dollars, even for the simplest fix.
And of course there was zero competition: there was one and exactly one vendor you could go to for this stuff. They were, of course, terrible with customer service, terrible with technician competence, and their products were consistently terrible.
I'm usually instantly skeptical of any tech startup that wants to airdrop into a problem space and disrupt things, but in this case, I'm 38,000% confident that there's something that can be done with this one.
>And of course there was zero competition: there was one and exactly one vendor you could go to for this stuff. They were, of course, terrible with customer service, terrible with technician competence, and their products were consistently terrible.
It's probably not a cost effective market to be in and getting a government monopoly is the only way to make it viable in the first place.
You had to have cashflow to pay those bills and wait for a redund? Sounds terrifying.
I have an Ontarian optometrist in the immediate family. I helped them set up a very tangled and innefficient ODSP claims process. It's a terribly, terribly managed program. I'm not sure if the OP has to pay and be reimbursed, but I wouldn't be surprised. That family member has to wait upwards of a year sometimes to be reimbursed, occaisionnaly they wait that much time only to be refused because of a "problem" which is not detailed anyways, so the business has to waste time to figure out problems. All the while, they are in the hole for that money.
Hopefully someone does the same thing for rollators (walking frames). I bought a few second-hand for my mum and they were all had disgustingly terrible usability. Brakes that didn't work properly (huge safety issue). Parts poking out (and flying brake-lines) that would catch on everything, or cause mum problems.
One sharp bit at the wheels damaged the skin at her ankle and she couldn't do anything for weeks to recover. It was a very serious problem caused by thoughtless design.
And we are in New Zealand which is better than many places. It is terrible watching people struggle in other countries (or lack access to the simplest requirement).
Good usability is hard enough to find for the smart and strong.
It is extremely hard to find for the weak and infirm. Especially when supplied through government services!
Finding her a wheelchair was hard because she is tiny and needed a teen sized one. But everything available second-hand or through our social services was designed for heavier people with wide arses (imported chairs?). Luckily found a wheelchair manufacturer in my city that had one designed for a teen on special (end-of-line - not manufacturing standard wheelchairs any more - changing to focus on expensive specialist sports chairs).
I have no knowledge of this specific product area but wondering what aspect of the wheelchair in the photo results in this seemingly high cost? (to note, I understand that this is still far cheaper than other wheelchairs). Is it the material cost? It looks like it's just a few pipes, a cushion, and a pair of wheels. About the same build as a basic bicycle.
Mostly the machines the factory uses. You can cut tubes by hand and drill those holes, but the machines are more accurate and faster. However those machines will cost you in the million range each in some cases. (the $1000 Chinese versions for home use are kits that will cost you $10k to make accurate and the quality means they will wear out fast so while find for building a couple they are more expensive than the million dollar machines in the long run) That investment needs to be amortized across whatever you build and wheelchairs are not high volume.
You can't go with cheaper less flexible machines either because each wheelchair needs to be somewhat custom fit. That in turn means you need to the more expensive machines instead of simple jigs that. They also need someone to program the machines for your custom fit (or software to create that program)
Fascinating. I assumed that most manufacturing machines can be reconfigured to build anything that machine can handle physically (i.e. not a particularly specialized machine) and, therefore, can be bought for cheap, or used. Coming from software I don't have a frame of reference for manufacturing cost.
It's a relatively small market so the up front capital and ongoing labor costs are probably pretty restrictive. Those parts are more expensive than you realize though with the wheels being the most expensive part if I had to wager, they're critical, specialized, and need to stand up to a lot of abuse.
I toured the Trek factory when they still made them in the US. They'd already drunk from the font of Goldratt wrt to Just in Time, but they would set up each day pretty much to make one model of bicycle for the whole day. Parts, tooling, paint booth, everything. The only thing that changed was sizes, and a model of bike tends to have the same geometries across all sizes. 78º angle here, 99º angle there. That may not be optimal for the rider but it's how you keep prices down and keep product lines from getting confusing.
If that's true of wheelchairs, you can get some economies of scale even if sizes vary. If it's not, then maybe that's one of the things we should tackle.
The bend angle of the tube that forms the seat support down to the legs seems like one of their major adjustment points for comfort and efficiency so I don't think you could have a similar setup. These are essentially semi-custom not a simple size based product like a bike. The extra adjustments are important because the users are in them many more hours a day so small problems can cause long term issues.
Their configurator has a very good model of what the chair will look like and you can see just how many knobs you can tweak and how that requires changing the core layout of the frame in a way that makes the kind of sizing system just not feasible. Scroll down on the Frame page to get to the fit sliders.
https://notawheelchair.com/pages/configurator
edit: Did the math and there's something like 25k different configurations they're selling before accounting for paint colors, just in the frame measurements. Granted, that's not accounting for the improbability or incompatibility of some parameter sets but that's still going to be a couple thousand different configs to build and stock. It doesn't work like a bike.
On a bike you have a little bit of flexibility due to the way the seat post works. Both in how the seat attaches and adding curves to the post, particularly for triathletes who like to favor their hamstrings over their quads, and sit considerably farther forward than any 'normal' cyclist would.
I know I've seen wheelchairs where the back was a tube that went into a tube. If you put the curve in the replaceable part you get more adjustment but less support. Generally the tolerances on bikes are very tight and medical equipment seems to be all over the place.
First, have you purchased a bicycle? "High quality" bicycles start at $1,000. (quality dimensions = weight, comfort, durability, flexibility)
Second, small scale manufacturing is expensive.
Third, large-scale manufactured wheelchairs have the same problem as the rest of the medical equipment world: prices are subsidized/inflated by insurance.
I just checked online and wheelchairs here (Canada) can be had for about US $500. What am I missing in this $1K “affordable” wheelchair idea?
Are you looking at "hospital" style wheelchairs, or dedicated use wheelchairs? The difference is huge. Those hospital style, one size fits all chairs are HEAVY, clunky, slow, and tire you out very easily if you don't have someone pushing you. Someone with a spinal cord injury or a variety of mobility constrants would be better off in a dedicated chair like this as they are lighter (sub 20lbs), designed to fit to the user, and offer more comfort which combats things like skin wounds.
If you look at wheelchairs from companies like TiLite or Quickie, you are starting off at almost double this price before any customization (rims, guards, etc). $1000 all in for a dedicated wheelchair is fantastic.
The weight of a bike or a wheelchair matters a lot less when you're at low speeds on level terrain without many turns, which describes a hospital to a T - they have to be able to get gurneys through these spaces, and if you think a wheelchair is heavy then brother have I got news for you.
But the moment you go outside now you're dealing with ramps and hills.
I'm 38, more fit than most, I had to interact with my father-in-law's wheelchair this weekend for the first time. He is 73 and expected to travel with it everywhere, lifting it in and out of some kind of a vehicle. I would _very_ much describe it as heavy, especially in the context of a 70+ (maybe 60+, maybe 50+) year old individual. I'm wondering what the news is.
You can get perfectly viable inexpensive bicycles as well - but if you were expecting to replace ALL of your other vehicle transport with a bike would you start by looking at ones with welded steel frames? The classic 80s Schwinn 10-speed that weighs in at 40 pounds but is pretty indestructible?
That's a $500 wheelchair.
From the article:
> When I first heard about this, it sounded awesome and a bit far-fetched. It’s hard to find a pair of quality wheelchair wheels for less than $500. Same with a rigid backrest. How were they going to offer both, plus a custom wheelchair frame without compromising on quality?
I have no idea though. Maybe there are sort of like… different classes of wheelchair, and they are trying to make not-terrible one? Like technically $5 headphones exist but not from a hobbyist point of view.
Insurance approved I think is the key differentiator.
the article isn't super clear, but it didn't sound like the goal for the $1000 wheelchair was for it to be insurance approved.
Insurance only pays for one chair every 8 years (IIRC, my aunt who was in a wheelchair died a few years back and so now I no longer have family conversations about these details). The ability to get custom chairs for different purposes would be nice. My aunt had an off road wheelchair for using around the yard, back when she could walk around the house (with a cane), but the doctor warned her she would be full time in a wheelchair around the house before the next time insurance would buy her one. So if you can get the expensive wheel chair for around the yard and afford to buy without insurance a second better suited for around the house that would be useful.
In the middle of the article they say that an insurance-approved wheelchair will tend to cost the patient $1000 after insurance. They're aiming for private purchase at the same price.
> What am I missing in this $1K “affordable” wheelchair idea?
Truckloads of paperwork, at least in the EU. Wheelchairs are regulated as "medical devices" since 2017, which does make sense given that people tend to spend a large portion of their day sitting in them and that they tend to be on the upper end of the body weight distribution... but the certifications make them much more expensive than they'd need to be, and they also prevent competition from entering the market.
Additionally, laws of scale apply here as well. Wheelchairs are a pretty bespoke, small scale industry - outside of large orders from civil protection agencies to be used in mass evacuation scenarios (the German THW and Red Cross for example have stockpiles, mostly used in foreign aid/crisis response and WW2-era bomb evacuations), every user has their own specific needs, making mass production all but infeasible.
$500 buys you a decent enough but hardly "happy to live with" indoor chair. Not the kind of chair that you go shopping in.
Most of them are under $200 in Amazon
There are many different classes of wheelchair. Most of the really cheap versions are medical chairs for people who can't move on their own for whatever reason, think the kind you see at hospitals or nursing homes for wheeling people around. This type is for people who can't walk but can still sit upright on their own and can move the wheelchair on their own. They're lighter, rigid and have higher efficiency than the medical type. They're also semi custom or adjustable to fit the user better than the temp/medical kind.
Would you buy an under-$200 bike off of Amazon? Especially one you spent all day on?
No, there are much better under-$200 bikes on craigslist. :P Get a nice $100 bike from the early 80s and pay a bike store for a tuneup, and you've got a pretty useful bike to ride on all day; gotta friction shift though. Not a lot of great looking wheelchairs on craigslist near me though.
I don't know about Amazon, but $200 is the price of a reasonable entry-level bike in any large surface store so yes?
I know this is HN and people will likely look down on anyone riding a <$2000 bike, but come on.
When our kids were growing quickly, we went through a number of sub-$300 bikes, both new and gifted by family. I ended up doing about one repair every two weeks, including broken derailleurs, junky brakes, jammed wheels, you name it. And our kids did not abuse those bikes.
I ended up buying a bike stand and a basic toolkit just so I could fix those bikes quickly and get the kids back outside. The parts on those bikes were absolute garbage and the reliability was zero.
Meanwhile I have a medium/high-end mountain bike from 1997 that still has some original parts on it, despite having seen time as a daily commuter and a trail bike.
A good thing to look at is resale value. Around here, you can resell a $1200 mountain bike for a good price. But you'd lucky to get much for a $800 bike.
I ride a lot, and am happy to ride cheap bikes, but I probably wouldn't ride a $200 Amazon or Walmart bike for rides longer than 30-40 miles without swapping the saddle, which would add anywhere from $40 to $150.
$200 is a reasonable price for a bicycle-shaped garage decoration which gets ridden for 30 minutes per month, which is indeed all that many people want out of a bicycle. Something practical for a 15 minute one-way commute that you ride every day is more like $500 new. Something which you could spend all day every day on would be a lot more.
The question was would you spend that on a device you spend 8+hrs in each day, which is something people often ignore.
This is a device you _live_ in. This is someone's mobility and independence you're talking about. Not a "I spend 30 minutes to an hour a day riding", or a "I commute to work on this" but instead "I use this to enjoy life".
Most people don't ride their bike every single day, sometimes for 8-12 hours per day.
If you did, you probably wouldn't be particularly happy with a $200 bike.
Smart phone under $200, would you want one?
Are there open source community for all things biomedical devices ? even partial exoskeleton (not joking, looking for practical attempts to help elders)
Most of this stuff is still a bit too expensive for DIY, Festool have an ExoActive exoskeleton that might be repurposable - though I think it's designed mostly for holding weight above the head.
There is the 'body braid' that is probably more suited for the tasks that the elderly have trouble with.
Two passes around the holes with the laser will get rid of the rewelding issue.
Or, what happens when you take greed and profit out of the equation.
>> It’s mesmerizing to watch. When the laser is done cutting, sometimes the leftover material just falls out, but sometimes it stays in place.
Please be very careful when watching an industrial laser, particularly one cutting shiny metal. I would honestly support any reg that puts hard barriers between eyeballs and running laser equipment. Invest in a good camera and watch the show on a screen.
It is enclosed. They show a picture later and there's a green safety window to view the work piece in the machine, that material will be designed to block whatever wavelength of light the laser is using (most likely IR, and what do you know safety glasses for the IR bands are mostly green).
Hah, now it makes more sense why Jerry was being so active on GoodTimesWithScar Twitter feed. Scar is also a wheelchair user, but is mostly famous for his YouTube landscaping videos.
Nice to see this, Jerry is not just another YouTuber grifter, he's a maker and has been involved building for his wife for a while.
His name is Zack, not Jerry. I know, it's confusing.
Meh, lots of people call him Jerry for a while now. I know you're not aware because you're not a fan and just wants to one up on HN.
He said already he chose Jerry in honor of his grandfather who was a fixer. On an interview with MKBHD (btw, I know MKBHD is not literally that guy's name) he said he just rolls with it when someone calls him Jerry.
So I follow some disability activists and it's kinda depressing just how hostile society is and people are to people with disabilities. And this crops up everywhere.
So for wheelchairs, for example, airlines routinely damage or destroy or lose wheelchairs, like 1000+ a month [1]. You need to be aware that wheelchairs typically need to be customized for the user. You typically can't just buy a wheelchair on Amazon and you're good to go. Using a replacement wheelchair can represent a significant safety risk.
Only now is the DoT starting to take action to curb this [2]. But what other group of people would such reckless disregard and gross negligence be tolerated for?
We just had Hurricane Helene wreak havoc through Appalachia. Usually in these situations people on the outside will criticize those who didn't evacuate. This happened in Katrina too. But you know who often can't evacuate? Disabled people.
Look at our response to Covid. The powers-that-be wanted everyone to get back to work and be busy worker bees that could once again produce value that would be exploited. So isolation restrictions were loosened. We capitulated to the irrational and completely self-centered whims of antivaxxers. There was a war on mask mandates. This went so far in some places as to literally ban masks [3].
This is all despite some people being immunocompromised and Covid never going away. We're essentially decided those people can just die.
But beyond them, you know what else Covid was? A mass disabling event. I'm talking about long Covid. This affects probably millions of people. These once healthy people are going to learn the hard way what the wanton disregard for disabled people looks like.
Anyway, I applaud efforts like cheaper and faster to produce wheelchairs. They won't suit everyone but we shouldn't tolerate a situation where it might take months for someone to get a wheelchair, But can we stop destroying wheelchairs too?
[1]: https://blurredbylines.com/articles/broken-wheelchairs-airli...
[2]: https://www.npr.org/2024/02/29/1234708784/airlines-wheelchai...
[3]: https://abcnews.go.com/US/wearing-masks-public-now-illegal-n...
Test comment for automation
Ehm... Seeing the product... A right price could be more 300$, and only because not made in China, than 1000... If mass produced could be more 150$...
You should do some research into wheelchairs and the differences in designs, materials, and life times to better understand why the $1000 price tag on what the company is offering is actually incredible. This is for someone who has a spinal cord injury and has to be in a chair fulltime, not those hospital style chairs you are probably thinking of.
before clicking the link, I thought it would be something along the lines of a Dean Kamen iBOT chair. Seems like a lot of money for a basic wheelchair.
These aren't basic wheelchairs like at the hospital imo. They are the wheelchairs that someone is going to spend their entire day/life in and use for mobility. Huge difference I think. It's also heavily customizable https://notawheelchair.com/pages/configurator
hmm... looks like the ibot is available? $25-30k
https://newmobility.com/the-ibot-is-back/
also I looked and a walmart wheelchair is $149. Wonder why it sucks.
That's really cool. But I also notice that when I go to thrift stores in my area that there are often wheelchairs available for $25 or less. Similar for walkers and other mobility devices that tend to be really expensive new.
This is why reading comments before contributing to the conversation is useful. There are already several comments outlining why a $25 wheelchair, especially a used one found at thrift stores, isn't comparable. Build quality, weight, fit, convenience, portability - all of these are reasons to spend more on a wheelchair.
We don't question why different computers are more expensive than others even though they all do the same job. We don't question why one bike costs more than another despite using the same mechanism for propulsion. Wheelchairs are another good with varying levels of quality at different price points. It's arguably more important for quality goods to be accessible because for many, they're living in these things constantly.
Under 30$ in bulk less than 30 pieces. https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Dansong-best-selling-...
1k$ is pretty steep.
These are not the same class of products.
The alibaba ones are almost like disposable lower quality solutions, have textile backs, and are foldable, etc. which also have their places and uses eg. after disasters, mass depoyment, handout at hospitals as temporary solutions.
The product in the linked article is clearly a higher quality item intended for longer term use by a single person.
1k$ is the cost of a decent office work-chair from any well-established low-to-medium volume vendor, as context. For a small shop like this it is an okay price, abeit the sum being a lot for many especialy in a new situation where they are forced to a wheelchair. Mass production could probably drive it down a lot, but you need volume for that.
ps: with volume you can also better amortize the engineering costs, which can be significant even for stuff looking simple and easy to do for those who did not do it yet... or did (even significant, core) parts of the product development in a large established firm. I also started a product development for simple looking stuff that turned out to be a lot lot more work when not being done only as a hack/PoC, but developed to a product. I abandoned the product before going for the official certifications (FCC, CE, etc.). For medical equipment they probably also need to meet regulations.
This is like saying a $30 display off Aliexpress is better than a $1000 display from a high quality brand. The only metric it will be better on will be the price, everything else will be a ridiculous comparison.
Shipping makes them pretty consistently $116ish/piece until you hit negotiated shipping numbers.
They're also not the kind of wheelchair people are looking for if they're self mobile which is the kind of chair the article is reporting on. Those are made lighter and more resilient to stand up to being used by one person out in the world rolling themselves around.
> 1k$ is pretty steep.
It's not if you don't want to sacrifice quality, USA made is also a bonus. Kudos to JerryRigEverything.
Go for it bud