‘SELF-AWARE’ WHEELCHAIR

On-demand injection molding, plus sheet metal fabrication, helps bring LUCI technology to market.

Brothers Barry and Jered Dean didn’t set out to start a company. But nothing on the market solved their problem: Keeping Barry’s daughter, Katherine, safe in her power wheelchair . Each year, wheelchair users get hurt when their devices, which weigh hundreds of pounds, tip over or run into objects.

When a family friend was sent to the hospital after a wheelchair fall, the Dean brothers – Barry, a Grammy-nominated Nashville songwr iter, and Jered, a Denver-based design engineer – got to work sketching ideas out at a restaurant on a paper tablecloth.

“Obviously we chose to go ahead and go for it because it didn’t seem anybody was going to do this anytime soon,” s aid Jered. “We couldn’t afford for our family to wait for somebody else to do it.” What they came up with is LUCI, an attachable accessory system that brings smart technology to power wheelchairs for stability, security and connectivity

LUCI’s hardware and software combine to give power wheelchair s a 360-degree view of the world to avoid collisions and drop-offs and also warn of tipping dangers. LUCI incorporates stereo-vision cameras and infrared, ultrasonic, and radar sensors in a patented, first-of-its-kind system that gets mounted between the seat and wheels of a power wheelchair.

The Dean brothers, with Barry as CEO and Jered as CTO, founded the LUCI company in 2017 and began selling the LUCI system in early 2021. Since then, the product has earned widespread recognition, named Time magazine’s Best Inventions of 2020, Popular Science’s Best of What’s New, a CES 2021 Health & Wellness Innovation Award and Mobility Management’s “Smart Technology” Product Award.

‘Invisible’ Housings

When the Deans’ announced their intent to develop LUCI, it generated intense interest from wheelchair manufacturers. For the speed and flexibility required, they turned to Protolabs for injection-molding of plastic prototypes and production parts. The company also provided prototyping of sheet metal components and, as it turned out, services they hadn’t anticipated using at the outset.

“We were developing fast and we were developing with a lot of unknowns,” Jered said. “There weren’t many other options because Protolabs could turn things quickly and cost effectively so that we could keep moving forward.”

As a power wheelchair user steers LUCI with a joystick or other means, onboard sensors map the surroundings to avoid anything in the way, from curbs and vehicles to pets and people. The mapping technology includes millimeter-wave radar sensors that detect the range, velocity and angle of objects in the environment. housings for LUCI’s sensors and electronics. Getting the design just right for the radar sensors housings involved a number of calls with Protolabs’ engineers to tweak those plans. our manufacturing, how we’re doing our product development, our sales,” Jered said. “All those things go to how can we get LUCI to the broadest number of users possible.

The plastic housings that contain the radar sensors, however, posed a design challenge, Jered said, because those housings need to be “invisible” to the business card-sized radar sensors. The housings have to be of a certain shape, material and thinness to enable the radar devices to do their job of identifying potential hazards.

Protolabs injection molded ABS plastic in a shape and at the thinness LUCI needed, enabling the radar devices to work properly. LUCI iterated rapidly on the housings, cutting test tools, having prototypes made and working with Protolabs on revisions before making new tools for another round of prototyping. According to Jered, the process was more cost-effective and the resulting design better than going to a typical injection molding house.

“It can be the difference between someone being able to independently drive themselves and somebody being pushed or not having that freedom in all locations,” he added. “That’s a lot of pressure on getting it out, getting it right and getting it done.”

In all likelihood, Jered said, LUCI wouldn’t have been available as soon as it was without Protolabs since it was able to deliver inj ection-molded parts within three to four weeks.

Another concern was finding a way of securely attaching all of the plastic housings holding LUCI’s various sensors and electronics to the system’s Smart Frame. The frame is a sheet metal platform that is mounted between the seat and wheels of a new or existing power wheelchair to install the LUCI system. Offering a user experience that merges rider intent and independence with the protection and assistance that LUCI’s technology provides also was a priority.

One expression of that, Jered said, needed to be through LUCI’s dashboard, or user interface. The dashboard, located on the wheelchair’s control panel, has four indicator lights to track things like Wi-Fi and cellular connection and sensor obstruction. He wanted each light to have a corresponding symbol that would clearly identify its function while also being attractive and durable.

Iterative Design

Jered and the LUCI engineering team used Protolabs’ online quoting system and automated manufacturing analysis to design plastic

Similarly, when Jered mentioned his concern about robustly secur ing the plastic housings to LUCI’S frame, Protolabs applications engineers suggested using the company’s insert molding service. Insert molding in this case incorporates threaded metal inserts into LUCI’s molded plastic housings to improve their strength when they’re attached to the frame.

LUCI also used Protolabs’ sheet metal fabrication service to prototype dozens of parts for the smart frame and brackets that hold LUCI’s sensors. For the dashboard, LUCI had considered using stickers, labels, or engraving for the symbols that identify the purpose of each indicator light.

Jered found a better solution in Protolabs’ pad printing process, which transfers a two-dimensional image, like a company logo, to a three-dimensional object. The pad printed symbols are more attractive, durable and convenient, Jered said.

Meeting Urgent Demand

Jered and Barry Dean said they felt a “super sense of urgency” to deliver LUCI to market, given their personal stake and the high level of interest from potential users.

“That urgency trickled through to everything: How we’re doing

Additionally, sheet metal prototypes arrived from Protolabs within a week compared to eight to 12 weeks from a traditional metal shop.

“The ability to save that much time while doing development work is worth a ton,” Jered said. “The hardware side is always the long lead time part of our development process, so being able to accelerate that to try to keep up with the software and electronics side is a major, major aid in the development of a product like LUCI.”

That speed and lower tooling costs make Protolabs a cost-effective choice, Jered said. While part pr ices are a little higher initially, they become more favorable with on-demand manufacturing.

Over a longer period of time, part prices from Protolabs rival domestic production. In addition, outsourcing from countries outside of the United States also involves hidden costs such as import tariffs, transportation delays, miscommunication and poor quality parts.

“We’re already working with Protolabs on new products,” Jered said, “so I think we’ll be partners for a good long time.” |DE https://luci.com www.protolabs.com