Chair Design (Tentative)

     Chair Design (Tentative)

     In Figure 1 there is the office chair that our group will be using for a base of the wheelchair. Not all of the pieces will be in the final product, these are some of the pieces that our group started with for the base of the chair.

Figure 1: Office chair backbone.

     The designs for the final product are being drawn up in Pro/ENGINEER, as of 4/23/2012 this is what the model looks like. A screen shot of what the front and side view of the chair might look like is depicted in Figure 2 and 3 respectively.

 

                               Figure 2: Chair's front view.                                                Figure 3: Chair's side view.

      From these Pro/Engineering screen shots you must wonder what we engineered, Figure 3 below is a close up of the base. As you see, 1 is the hydraulic system that will be moving the chair up and down due to neck movements. 2 is where the gear is, however the actual gear will be grooved. Attached to this gear will be a chain connected to another gear connected to a motor (not seen in this photograph). This will be doing the turning of the whole system depending on the left and right movements of the neck muscles. You might ask, why would the top portion of the chair move but not the base (4)? This is because of 3, which is a hallow cylinder where 5 will be inserted to connect to the base while being able to move freely.

Figure 3: Close up of the chair's base.

     Other things that aren't included in this Pro/ENGINEERING representation of our group's chair is the chip that is programmed to tell the motor and hydraulic system to move, assuming that it isn't run off of a computer. Also a data acquisition system (DAQ) that will receive the information from the electrodes on the patient for the chip/computer to read.