Folding Chair Case Study

4. SOLUTION

4.1 Different solutions - 4.1.1 Standing wheelchair using the principle of folding chairs:

To help patients stand up, rotating the seat up so as to push up is the easiest and widely used solution. It is noticed that rotatable seat is very commonly applied to one kind of chair in our daily life. That is the folding chair. But most of the folding chairs rotate in the inverse direction and its legs will get closed while folding the seat. So reversing the direction was a problem, the solution is as follows.

This standing chair consists of four main parts including the base, seat, back and handrail. The base is a horizontal board with four chair legs or four wheels if used as a wheel chair. The seat is hinged at the front of the

If the wheelchair was so designed that the chair pushes the patients up, then the gravity will always be the obstacles to overcome. One way to make gravity our friends instead of foes is to create a new concept which different from moving the central gravity point up to make patients stand up. So this solution was to make the seat rotate down slowly so as to put patient’s foot on the ground and they can stand naturally. By doing so, we need only to consider about how to lift the patients upper body up. Lifting up things vertical is much simpler. What 's more, the gravity would be the power supply to work the whole system. It is also much easier to restore the wheelchair to sitting condition because after the patients stand up all we need to lift up is the weight of the seat which is not too much contrasted to human 's weight. The main part of this solution is the damping system, see Figure 4.2. It decreases the speed of the patient to get down with the seat. So it may have two properties. First, control the speed of flow in a certain interval. Second, this damp only happens in the working process. No resistance is there in the restore