About 6 billion people, 15% of which persons with disabilities, are predicted to be living in urban centers by 2050. The current lack of environmental accessibility faced by people with disabilities in many cities presents opportunity to promote an accessible and inclusive Urban Agenda [1].
The persons with disabilities often deal with limiting situations or with various types of barriers that do not facilitate the autonomy and social participation.
The social problem includes:
• physical access to vehicles and transportation systems
• information useable by everyone
• training of transport staff to understand their needs
• design and layout of urban areas to enable people to move safely and confidently.
The whole mobility chain must be considered:
• Disabled and elder people can only make a journey if all the links in the chain are accessible from door to door.
• Disabled and elder people are most likely to move autonomously, without having access to public transportation systems, for significant distances, despite their difficulties. Both lack of accessibility and cost are exacerbating this problem.
Recent relevant research in this area demonstrated the feasibility of several new solutions for autonomous mobility of disabled, developed basing on State-of-The-Art technology. Nevertheless, the potential for new solutions is limited by the very high cost of the devices and by the fragmentation of the market due to the need of customized and personalized solution. For this reason, the wheelchair product is usually handcrafted, with weak potential of industrialization.
Concurrently, cities and urban contexts are evolving to become smart and connected, resembling the model of a system of interconnected systems, including employment, health care, retail/entertainment, and not least, transportation. The systems are tied together by information and communications technologies (ICT) that transmit and process data about all sorts of activities within the city. Smart mobility and vehicle sharing services are recognized as instrumental for sustainable development.
FreeWheel promotes social inclusion of disabled and elderly people with motion impairment through a mobility solution that increases accessibility of indoor and outdoor locations.
The FreeWheel solution consists of a motorization unit integrating an autonomous “smart active” module which can be connected to existing wheelchairs by customized parts built on demand, leveraging Additive Manufacturing technologies, and an app, delivering a suite of functionalities to manage the use of the unit according to the needs of the user.
At the end of the project, the app was developed and allows the user to send the data of their wheelchair, create an interface via 3D printing that adapts to it and that will be mounted on the place of use. In addition, autonomous driving of the FreeWheel module is also possible via the app.
