International Nonprofit Humanitarian Organization to Open Source Wheelchair Technology

Irvine, CA, December 01, 2016 --(PR.com)-- Free Wheelchair Mission, a world leader in mobility solutions for people with disabilities in developing countries, recently confirmed funding commitments of more than a quarter of a million dollars from private donors to construct a whole wheelchair test lab at the organization’s home office in Irvine, California.

The test lab is designed to propel wheelchairs over repeated obstacles while continuously monitoring stress, strain, accelerations, and temperature rise due to friction. The obstacles will be designed to simulate the same types of obstacles that wheelchair users encounter in developing world conditions.

Currently, Free Wheelchair Mission can only evaluate its wheelchair designs by field-testing samples in one of the 93 countries it serves and monitoring the results. This process is expensive, takes a year or longer, and the data received is often ambiguous.

“Our new Free Wheelchair Mission test lab will compress a full year of field testing into a few hundred hours of lab testing. It will greatly accelerate our product improvement program and provide reproducible data. We are unaware of any other wheelchair provider having this ability,” said Free Wheelchair Mission Founder and President, Don Schoendorfer.

Over 100 million people worldwide are in dire need of a wheelchair, yet most do not have the resources to obtain one. The need for wheelchairs is growing due to aging populations, natural disasters, traffic accidents, and political unrest.

As a member of the Board of Directors of the International Society of Wheelchair Providers (ISWP), Schoendorfer will make the Free Wheelchair Mission test lab services available to other ISWP members who are producing wheelchairs for the developing world.