It is imperative for clinicians and industry professionals to visualize and understand a client’s clinical presentation to properly identify the need for a carbon fiber ultra-lightweight manual wheelchair.
It is imperative to connect the dots between the client’s clinical impairments and the functional activities of daily living for procurement of funding.
Clinical rationale for prescribing an ultra-lightweight manual wheelchair can be broken up into two main categories: upper extremity preservation and propulsion efficiency. These are outlined below with the consequent rationale to help support justification.
Upper extremity conditions can lead to costly treatments or surgery, expensive hospital stays, and the potential need to transition into a power wheelchair.
Efficiency is defined as “the accomplishment of a job with a minimum expenditure of time and effort.” The goal is to have less push strokes per day and a longer distance achieved with each push stroke. By decreasing rolling resistance, one can significantly impact efficiency.
At Motion Composites, our MotionU team is passionate about educating clinicians and end users on the rationale behind why carbon fiber is a solution for optimal upper extremity preservation and propulsion efficiency. We believe it should be more widely utilized in the manual wheelchair community. The properties of carbon fiber and how they can significantly improve a client’s quality of life can now be found in our one-page justification handout!
You can read more about the other beneficial characteristics of carbon fiber in our Carbon Fiber 101: Everything you need to know about it blog post and our technology page.
