Scott Daigle Innovates Wheelchair Transportation

It’s hard to believe that the University of Illinois is a school and not a factory that produces some of the country’s greatest entrepreneurs. Among the ranks of potential up and comers is graduate student, Scott Daigle, who has been working on perfecting the functionality of wheelchairs.

Daigle’s idea is to “help people who use manual wheelchairs move more efficiently.” He accomplished this by creating a design that uses gear ratios (much like a bike) that allow the operator to work at the most efficient speed. The wheelchair uses continuously variable transmissions (CVT) to give it an infinite number of gear ratios so that there is a theoretically perfect gear for every speed, slope and surface.

The wheelchair shifts automatically by sensing the speed of the chair and the slope of the ground and then picks an appropriate gear ratio. What really makes it stand out is that the operator doesn’t have to be aware that they are in a special chair. “They just sit down and use it like a normal chair,” said Daigle. “There is no learning curve.”

When asked how he came up with this idea, Daigle pointed out that he had observed students on campus who use wheelchairs to get around daily. He noticed that they were going as fast as they could, but their arm speed was slowing them down- they needed to be able to push harder. “So, I thought about it like a bike,” he said, “where you can shift gears and be able to push harder at a higher gear and go faster.”

Daigle, who is a first semester Masters student in Mechanical Engineering at Illinois, has been working on this venture for about six months and says it is still in its infancy.  Professor Brian Lilly was his first source of motivation to turn his idea into a product. In Lilly’s class, Technology Entrepreneurship (GE 461), Daigle presented his idea; Lilly recognized it as having a value and decided to help him fund building a prototype. "The grant for the prototype was funded by the NCIIA (National Collegiate Inventors and Innovator Alliance)," said Lilly as he expressed his gratitude for their support.

Currently, Daigle also uses the help of Professor Hsiao-Wecksler (mechanical engineering) and Professor Jake Sosnoff (kinesiology). Daigle also works in a group within the kinesiology department that performs wheelchair research, helping him think of new ways to tweak his own design.

Daigle’s plan for the future of his venture is to create a polished and finished product that can be turned into a real business. However, he remarks that in order to get it there, the chair needs to go through a few redesign stages to make the components lighter and smaller. Daigle commented that the first prototype which is definitely an early stage prototype, was designed to be quick and cheap to make. While it is not fully functioning yet, it would take only a couple of weeks to machine the complex parts that would make it lighter, smaller and functioning at a high performance level.

Until last semester, Daigle didn’t know much about the Technology Entrepreneur Center (TEC). Now, he feels that without the program and Brian Lilly’s help, he wouldn’t have been able to get as far as he did with his project. Daigle also hopes to attend his first TEC event this winter – the Silicon Valley Workshop that TEC holds in California each year. We can only imagine what great ideas he could bring back from that experience.