This Project was developed as a Design Undergraduate Thesis, at Instituto Mauá de Tecnologia in 2019, and the goal of the project was to create a product and a service to help wheelchair users in their daily life, the final solution was a whelchair motorization service, as will be seem shortly.

The product can act as an extension of a regular wheelchair, where the user can just dock-in, open the app, and start using it as a motorized wheelchair.

The service will be provided in areas with large spaces, such as parks, airports, and shopping malls. The product stays in a hub, where at the same time it can be charged electrically, and provide information guides for new users.

The service app was designed with the goal of being easy to use, with every important information available right away for the user, and with it you could find near Forward Hubs, and add credits for your account, to use the service for as much time as you want.

One of the main concerns of our team when designing both the product and the service, was to have a friendly visual identity, where the user could identify as a trustworthy brand.

The user can use the service for as long as it pleases, and it would be charged for the time spent with it, such as many other urban mobility platforms available today, what would improve the alternative of buying a new motorized wheelchair, that could be much more expensive.

As a proof on concept, we did a model in a smaller scale, that could be controled in real-time, where it used the same idea of the original design, where two motors transmit the rotation to the users manual wheelchair, and being two separate motors, the rotation speed could me used to rotate the wheelchair in the same axis. The engines were programmed with an Arduino circuit, the wheelchair and the user where made os PS, and the exterior of the product was 3D printed.

This project was one of the winners of the Aexam-Eureka 2019 award, aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

With all of what was presented in mind, we hope to improve the everyday lives of people who use wheelchairs, and bring more agility for their urban mobility, as the brand name emphasises: to keep going forward.