Cornell Students Button Down Walker Safety

While many rolling walkers are equipped with bicycle-style squeeze brakes, they’re sometimes hard to use for frail seniors who have little hand strength. So biomedical engineering students at Cornell University have come up with an electronic braking system that uses buttons instead.

For three years, a team of graduate students from the Department of Biomedical Engineering and undergraduate seniors from several departments in the College of Engineering worked with David Lipson, Cornell professor of engineering, on the problem: how to prevent elderly users with limited mobility from inadvertently falling when they use a braking walker.

Relying on handgrip sensors, the Smart Walker starts in the braked position. Low-strength users need only touch a button to disengage the brake electronically and begin moving. Once the user lets go of the handgrips, the walker automatically resets to the braked position.

The highly sensitive button runs to a microprocessor that sends information to a linear actuator which, in turn, pulls on a mechanical brake to stop the walker’s wheels.

According to its designers, the added stability and ease of operation for users with low strength or impairment in their hands could reduce accidental falls, a significant source of injury for seniors with limited mobility.

The electronic walker concept came from 16 years of thought by Eli Einbinder, a Weill Cornell Medical College-affiliated psychiatrist. Einbinder was a tennis player and skier before 1993, when he injured his back.

“I’m sitting in my office looking for another hobby,” recalls Einbinder, “and I start noticing people with walkers-how difficult they are, how not user-friendly. I’m also an inventor, so I decided to design a mechanical walker that works better. I soon realized that an electrical model with a button for braking is much simpler and easier for really anyone to use.”

Einbinder has been a consultant on the walker project since its inception, working with Lipson’s team at least weekly via conference calls and e-mail. He has recently received a patent for his solution.

“The augmented walker appeared simple, but it also was a challenging design,” Lipson says. “We had constraints on cost, weight, simplicity and several choices for which approach to use. This made it a terrific project because the students could look at many designs, with improvements in the subsequent years by a new team.”

The U.S. Census Bureau reports that by the middle of the 21st century, about 80 million Americans will be 65 or older. According to research, medical costs resulting from falls by the elderly are expected to approach $32.4 billion by 2020.