Technical Advisor: Professor Jerry Hatfield

Sponsor: Meyerson Foundation

The purpose of the David and Minnie Meyerson Foundation is to identify, promote and support endeavors likely to benefit people with disabilities, with a focus on children with disabilities. This wheelchair trainer will do just that by providing more freedom and independence in the everyday life of children with limited motor skills. Children who might otherwise not be considered a candidate for a powered chair and may not have this opportunity without the wheelchair trainer. It can help these children achieve their goals and dreams.

User: Flagstaff Unified School District

The wheelchair trainer will also offer an inexpensive way for the Flagstaff Unified School District to provide mobility to students without their own powered chair while they are in school. The school district is also in a unique position to identify future clients and test to see if they are candidates for a motorized wheelchair.

Problem Statement:

Our problem is to design and construct a device that will either attach to or will allow an existing manual wheelchair to be temporally powered and then easily removed when finished.

System Diagram

Requirments and Specifications

Wheelchair Trainer Owners Manual

Progress:

The wheelchair trainer has been delivered to the client.

Through out the course of this project the members of team HotWheels have learned a lot about team work, communication, and problem solving. The two team structure of this project gave us an opportunity to practice communication between engineers of different disciplines, a skill that is likely to prove invaluable in our future careers. This structure also gave us the unique opportunity in the capstone design process to work on coordination between different teams. Again, this is a skill that we will all have to practice later in life, but one that most capstone design teams do not get the chance to experience. Perhaps the most important experience that we have gained through this project is problem solving. During the implementation and testing of the wheelchair trainer’s electrical systems several problems, both large and small, raised their ugly heads unexpectedly. All of us on team HotWheels got more practice than we probably wanted thinking on our feet to trouble shoot and solve these problems.

Acknowledgement

Team Hotwheels sends our gratitude and appreciation to all who supported us in creating this project. We want to especially acknowledge Larry Gallagher and Jane Scott for supporting Team Hotwheels and presenting a great opportunity to expand our knowledge while helping out our community. We also want to give our appreciation to Professor Jerry Hatfield and Dr. David Scott for guiding this team to success. The team would like to give a word of thanks to Meyerson Foundation for the support of funding the project. Last but not least, we would like to extend our gratitude to our clients who have the desire to achieve their life's goals and not let any obstacles stand in their way. Team Hotwheels is happy to support them in any way.