Saturday, November 12, 2011
Father’s homemade machine helps disabled son to walk
Great story from the BBC about an Argentinean man who built a device to help his son to walk.
The first version of the machine designed for Ivo Cardile, who has been severely brain damaged from birth, was built in just a month out of a bicycle and wooden planks.
His father Jorge has now built four machines and is using them to try to help other disabled children.
Click to see the video.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-15695991
Want one! I’m going to write to him and find out if it’s possible to get one built here under licence. It might grab someone’s attention and provide a new business opportunity for a local fab shop.
The official website for this project is here:
Tuesday, November 15, 2011 - 20:17:16
I wrote off and got a reply.
I got a reply - just working on the translation.
Seems the father (Jorge) says that he’s just a car repairman and that he has prototypes, but is looking for someone to pick up the ball and run with it.
Normally that would mean a big company spending a lot of money developing and tooling up a production facility to produce these, but the problem there is that a big company would want to see a sizeable return on their investment which kind of runs counter to the idea of providing cheap and effective help to the people who need it who, in most cases, will be relatively poor.
Maybe someone in China or India could make them cheaply and profitably - maybe someone here could too - there’s a wheelchair factory in Tbilisi I could run it by. That place employs disabled people themselves so I think they might be interested. I have a contact for their anyway, so I’ll run it up the flagpole and see if anyone there salutes.