(quiet electric motor sounds)
-[Zack] Alright Cambry, as a wheelchair user,
what is the biggest obstacle we are constantly trying to overcome?
-[Cambry] Stairs!
-Wheelchairs are just not designed to go up or down stairs.
But, today I think we found something that can and I'm excited to try it out.
-Let's get started.
[Intro]
-So stairs are fairly common, and when we do come across them we have a couple different options.
-So I can go up the stairs on my own, but it requires quite a bit of upper body strength
to maneuver the stairs. And then I leave my wheelchair at the bottom of the stairs.
So not super functional.
-I can also carry her up the stairs, but as you can see from the footage,
it's not the safest thing in the world. I can't really see
my feet on the way down. It's kind of dangerous. Doable, but dangerous.
-We do have an elevator in our home, so that addresses this set of stairs,
but it's pretty expensive to install an elevator in your home.
-It's like $20,000, so most people aren't going to go out and buy one.
There are cheaper wall mounted stair lifts, but also those are permanent fixtures and only
address one set of stairs. Today we found something that's mobile, looks cool...kind
of like a tank...and I think it solves most of our problems.
It's called a Mobile Stair Lift. It's a little bit less expensive than a normal wheelchair,
and can carry 400 pound payload up and down 100 flights of stairs before the battery runs out.
Inside the box it arrives fully assembled which is nice.
And the way it transports people up and down stairs are the treads on the back...kind
of like a tank or a tractor. With a single battery and a single motor, the whole
thing weighs about 65 pounds, which is pretty portable for a mobile stair climbing system. Are
you ready to try it out?
Alright, so this is our first time using this so I think I'm going to do a test run without Cambry
in it for safety. But on the back there's a little knob that we can twist and extend
this so that when we're going upstairs I can be a little farther away from her. And then, like
I showed earlier, we have the yellow and green buttons at the top. Yellow is down, and green
is up. So I'm going to back it up to the stairs, lean it back, and then go green. Woo!
And we're back down. Are you ready Cambry?
It is time for the first ride. So the one downside of this chair is that we
will need to bring up her normal wheelchair after the fact, but hopefully this is still
quite a bit safer than me carrying her up the stairs.
-Alright.
-Okay, the wheels are locked. We have Cambry in place. I'm going to tilt you back a little bit.
Did I say green was up? [Laughing]
-Oh goll!
-How's that?
-It's fine. It's just awkward holding a camera.
-Are you nervous?
-I feel good. I feel like it's really strong.
-What if we just stopped in the middle of it?
-Then what?
-I don't know. What? Oh you tried it!
-Yeah. The treads stay in the same spot and stop in the middle of the stairs.
-Well I can't see that but I believe you.
-How was your first ride?
-It was great. We survived. We made it. It was not hard for me, just unexpected.
-There are arms at the bottom so you can make this into like a two person...like one
person at the top, one person at the bottom to keep it more stable. I would say
this is not something you want as like your permanent daily solution.
-For sure.
-But it's good...
-Live on one story.
-Yeah. If you have someone who visits who is in a wheelchair who needs to go upstairs,
this is a good option for visitors. So every now and then. It's good to have options though.
-Maybe not in a place that you're living, but
maybe for a building that you need to be getting into frequently it would be nice to have.
-That doesn't have a ramp or something. Yeah. Should we go down the stairs?
-Yeah.
-So I'm going to tilt you back a little bit, press the yellow button.
-Okay, okay.
-Get you close to the edge.
-Don't warn me or anything. Oh, okay! It isn't that bad. Phew.
-The only thing I had to do was pull slightly on the top
to keep the top treads against the stairs. The camera's heavy...
-Yeah!
-And that was probably like 10, 15 pounds worth of force. Maybe 20 pounds worth of force keeping
this backwards against the stairs. But other than that, the machine was doing all the work.
-I was just working to hold the camera in place.
-It's a big camera. Then when we're all done, you can just collapse everything
and it folds up. And then we can stick the whole thing in a closet.
-Or a trunk.
-So we know the Mobile Stair Lift works with Cambry, but Cambry's pretty small so we want to
see how it functions with a much larger payload. So I have about 350 pounds here that I'm going to
load up on the Mobile Stair Lift and we'll give it a shot with that. So what do you think Cambry?
-It like kind of reminds me of the Michelin man...but not. Like it's black,
tires...I don't know.
-That is a lot of weight. If it can handle this...I'll be impressed.
-Buckle her up.
-Rolling was easy enough.
Arm raised up. Do you think it can do it?
-I'm holding my breath. Let's just go.
-Okay let's tip it back on the stairs.
That's impressive.
-How much work are you doing?
-I'm holding it against the stairs a lot.
Like if I...I mean I could do it one handed, but it's sketchy. So I would say there definitely
should be someone down there on the bottom end. But yeah, the motor itself, like it can pause in
the middle and now it's holding itself, I'm just keeping it pulled back against the stairs. Woo!
So I would say that if the rider is between 100-150 pounds you can do it pretty easily with
one person. But anything over that...definitely have someone at the top and the bottom.
-Oh and another use for this that I was thinking would be if like your spouse or someone in your
family was injured temporarily...so like if they broke their hip or something, or
for whatever reason they're not able to walk for a short period of time, I think this would
be a good fix for living in a two story house, like if your bedroom or bathroom are upstairs.
-Yeah because there's no permanent installation. Hence, the “mobile” part
of the Mobile Stair Lift. Now normally I like to take things apart and figure out how they work,
but this thing is so simple that I really don't need to remove anything. We're going
to have Cambry over here press the buttons for us. Go for it. So both of these tracks,
which are super thick rubber, are being spun by this motor right here. And the motor, I imagine,
has a shaft that goes into this section with the gear that's turning this axle, and it's
moving both treads at the same time. Whether it's going up the stairs or down the stairs,
it'll flip directions. That way one tread won't spin faster than the other one since they have
a solid rear axle. Which is the exact same axle that we have on the Rig. A solid axle
keeps the tires spinning at the same speed and gives you more traction. Once it's upright,
we can look underneath and this is where the battery is at. So this is the charging port,
as well as it has a key to turn if off and on. And when it's on, that light turns on.
Alright Cambry, now that you've gone upstairs in this tank of a wheelchair, what are your thoughts?
-I love seeing new innovations for obstacles that wheelchair users come
across because there are a lot. And I'm just stoked to see where people's brains are at.
-It's good to see more solutions for a problem that exists. I like that they kept everything
super simple. It's like the bare...not bare metal because it's painted, but it's a pretty
skeletal design to keep the price down. And I'm impressed with the treads, how solid those were,
that I could let off the power and it would still hold its position on the stairs. I would have to
hold it backwards onto the stairs to keep it from tipping. So it does need at least one person,
and there are spots for two people which is good. But yeah, I felt like it was super solid.
-Yeah, I was thinking when we were using this, of when I was younger I would visit my grandparents
for Christmas, just myself, and they had a flight of stairs. It was hard to get up and down, but I
crawled up and down to visit them. If we had this, it would have made those trips so much easier.
-And they probably could have operated it.
-Definitely.
-Well if you have any questions leave them down in the comments. We'll try
to answer them for you. Come hang out with us both on Instagram and Twitter. And...
-Thanks a ton for watching. We'll see you around.