Folding Wheelchair Wheels
SUMMARY
Duncan is an MA graduate of the Royal College of Art Industrial Design Engineering in 2007 and an MEng graduate from University of Bath Mechanical Engineering and Design with French in 2005. He started his career as an ergonomist for Renault in France before becoming a product design and engineering consultant, currently as founder of Clerkenwell based product design studio 7TH.
He has created successful designs for new products in markets as diverse as surgical devices, kitchenware and toys, for companies including Olympus Medical, Joseph Joseph and Microsoft Research. His work has won many prestigious awards including three Red Dot design awards and most recently Best of Innovation at CES.
Morph Wheels are a patented design for foldable wheelchair wheels. They are full-sized wheels of the type that can be used on bicycles or wheelchairs and can be folded down to a convenient size and shape for storage and transportation when not in use. The wheels have a simple and robust construction, use standard and readily available tyres and can be folded and re-deployed quickly and easily, all with the tyre in place on the wheel rim.
Duncan Foster Fitzsimons
Inventor
Duncan created the first foldable wheel prototypes whilst studying at the Royal College of Art (RCA), supported by the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851. He subsequently undertook the key step of converting this concept into a working design for manual wheelchairs as the James Dyson Innovation Fellow. His objective with this development was to overcome many of the major challenges facing manual wheelchair users and it is hoped this product can significantly improve the everyday experience of living with and using a manual wheelchair.
The wheels have been successfully demonstrated on bicycles and wheelchairs, delivering a safe, smooth ride with greater flexibility and manoeuvrability. User focussed research workshops were undertaken at the Royal College of Art and feedback from users was tremendous with 81 per cent of users confirming that if a wheelchair with folding wheels was available, they would buy it instead of their current wheelchair.
In a Royal College of Art study, all manual wheelchair users said they experienced problems with car travel and 68 per cent cited the difficulty of getting the chair and wheels into the car and the resulting lack of space as being the main problems. The folding wheels overcome these problems giving the user greater independence and mobility.
The folding wheels are covered by European Patent Application 07252385.5, International Patent Application PCT/GB2008/002015, US2010201098 (A1), CN101678707 (A), EP2164714 (A1) and other pending applications.
The wheels design was licensed in 2011 to leading home healthcare provider, Maddak for use on wheelchairs and were launched in the USA as Morph™. Duncan has currently reclaimed the license and is ready to license the wheels in other areas and markets.
In 2013 the foldable wheels were awarded the Design Museum’s Transport Design of the Year, and Icon Magazines Product Design of the Year, as well as becoming a finalist for the Saatchi & Saatchi Award for World Changing Ideas.
Morph Wheels and some of the first development prototypes of the foldable wheel design can be seen as part of the permanent collection at the Design Museum, London.
