GripStrip

In my Design Thinking and Communication course, we partnered with Dr. Bridget Fowler at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab who presented us with the challenge of designing a device that would make it easier for users to operate the lever on their wheelchair's leg rests. The current users had difficulty visually and tactilely locating the lever that allows the leg rests to swing out or be removed. This poses a significant problem as moving the leg rest is the only way some users are able to safely transfer themselves in and out of the wheelchair, and the inability to operate the lever by themselves impedes the users' independence and freedom. My team's solution to this challenge is the GripStrip:

Development Process

The following are lo-fi mockups that we constructed after interviewing several different wheelchair users.

After performing user testing with the four mockups shown above, we realized that the main issue resided in finding the lever instead of operating the lever. Once our users found their leg-rest levers, most of them had no trouble using the levers. Therefore, we scrapped our previous designs and opted for one that highlighted visual and tactile elements that would help users find the leg-rest lever.

We also identified several requirements that our design needed to fulfill: ease of use, size (must but small enough to not be an obstruction to other functions and be ADA compliant), universality (must be able to fit different types of levers), and accessibility (should be easily identifiable and pose no discomfort in use).

Final Prototype

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