SARAH Lago Norte is a well known rehabiliation centre in Brasilia and has to deal with a great demand for wheelchairs. It took too much time for them to make suitable wheelchairs for patients with complex deformations such as scoliosis or patients with a spinal cord injury. They needed someone to optimize and expand the production of customized wheelchair cushions and backrest using a low cost CAD/CAM system.
Firstly, the patient had to take place on top of two cushions which where placed in the wheelchair of the patient itself, one cushion for the back and for the seat. A pump attached to each cushion, removed all the air which resulted into a solid cushion. A Kinect scanner was then able to create a digital image of this solid shape on the computer and could be edited by using the CAD software Meshmixer. Once a smooth seat was created, it got digitally sliced into sevaral layers with a heigt of 70mm and send to a cutting machine (the Brawel Máquinas router) which needed 1,5 day to finish the layers. The last step of this process was carried out by the technicians who glued the hard foam layers together, they applied a soft layer of foam on top of the harder foam blocks and covered the entire cushion with a nice piece of neoprene. After three days of hard work, the wheelchair was ready.
All the editing and scanning was carried out by only two employees, which was the most time consuming part of the process at the time. This is where I stepped in. Firstly, I got to know all the ins and outs of their current method and started to create a couple of manuals to make more employees able to make these customized cushions. I made some changes to speed up the process and reduced the workload of the two employees with these manuals. It also enabled other rehabilitation centres in Brazil to make these cushions since SARAH Lago Norte was the only centre in the whole of Brazil which was able to do this.