Several leading experts have recently pointed to manual wheelchair use as a leading cause of shoulder and wrist injuries. Consider, for example, this excerpt from an article written by Rory Cooper, Ph.D., and Michael L. Boninger, M.D., which appeared in Paraplegia News, March 1999: “Most people experience arm pain and degeneration after prolonged manual wheelchair use. Shoulders and wrists are the most common areas for pain and repetitive strain injury. Studies have shown that 30 to 70 % of manual wheelchair users experience carpal tunnel syndrome or some form of shoulder-joint degeneration.”

While Cooper and Boninger admit that the exact cause isn’t known, they strongly suggest that pushing the wheels or hand rims of a manual wheelchair (a propulsion method which hasn’t changed much in almost three centuries) is at least partly responsible for some these injuries.

Enter HelixSphere Technologies Inc., a Calgary-based, publicly traded company which is focused on “maximizing human power through innovation.” HelixSphere says the hand-rim drive system is inherently flawed—it utilizes weak muscle groups while contributing to muscle imbalances. The result, says the company, is limited speed and power. In short, using a push-rim wheelchair is inefficient, not to mention unhealthy.

HelixSphere’s answer is a proprietary, spiral, direct drive propulsion system which uses a “bio-mechanically efficient” straight push-pull of the arms. Remember the top you had as a child, the kind that you pushed down to make it spin? That’s the concept that the HelixSphere drive system employs. The wheelchair user simply pushes-pulls with handles (one on each side) along grooved, or threaded, shafts, which then turn the wheels. Just like a mountain bike, faster speed or greater hill-climbing ability can be achieved with the introduction of multiple gearing at the final drive.

In addition to wheelchair applications for this propulsion system, the company has patents pending on bicycle and manual powered watercraft applications. The company’s present emphasis, however, is commercializing the wheelchair.

At this point, the company has built only a conceptual prototype. The next step is to refine the conceptual into a advanced working prototype, requiring significant additional research and funding. Help arrived on July 24, when the National Research Council announced it had awarded a grant to the company. Intended specifically for development of the advanced prototype, the grant will be provided on a non-repayable basis for 50% of the incurred costs.

The result is a shot in the arm, both in a monetary sense and as a vote of confidence. “Really, they don’t just give it away to anybody,” says Robert Chin, President of HelixSphere. “It shows they feel there is merit in where we’re going and what we’re doing, and that we have a sound business structure, since that usually seems to be the basis for how they award these (grants).”

Chin explains that the advanced prototype will be designed and built by a team that includes the Production Manufacturing Department at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT) and private consultants.

The prototype should be completed before Christmas. At that point, Chin says HelixSphere will produce a test run of beta units. “We’re hoping to build five or ten of them, which will allow us to provide them to volunteer users to test in a real world environment. The goal is find out pros and cons and what further advances, changes or modifications we should be making.” Incidentally, the volunteer users are CPA Alberta members.

A subsequent, further refined model will then be developed, which will go to the Human Performance Laboratory at the University of Calgary for human efficiency and bio-mechanical testing. At that point, the company plans to begin application for FDA for acceptance into the U.S. market.

“We’d like to go faster, but you have to work with other people’s schedules as well,” says Chin “The other thing is that people who I look at as mentors have said, ‘don’t be in a big, big rush, because you’re going to miss stuff.’”

For more information, contact HelixSphere Technologies Inc. at  (403) 216-5010  or visit the company’s website