Home health care going high-tech

The wheelchair, souped up with snap-on handlebars, a motor and a rough-terrain front tire, zipped around a squiggly little track at the city convention center.

"Wow!" exclaimed Donald Feldstein, a shopper scoping out equipment for clients.

"That's a standard wheelchair? You take a standard wheelchair and add that front end!" said Feldstein, a vocational counselor at Jackson Health Systems in Miami.

The attachment, which turns any ordinary wheelchair into a motorized tricycle, can go off-road at 11 mph with a 198-pound rider. Called the PowerTrike, the British-made innovation was among the scores of new products shown at the Medtrade 2001 home healthcare exposition.

Other new products include a mini-CD to let patients carry their medical histories with them, reversible hats for women who have lost hair to chemotherapy, wheelchair drink holders and a number of walkers and scooters.

Among the wheelchairs is a collapsible, non-motorized chair which can be made up to 30 inches wide, for users weighing up to 800 pounds.

"People are getting bigger," said Paul Lawson, division manager for Theradyne Health Care Products of Jordan, Minn. "Especially when they're not very mobile, they have a tendency to get even bigger."

Alan Ludovici, a paraplegic who is mobile, rolled his low-back, armless titanium wheelchair to get a closer look at the PowerTrike, displayed by the British company pdq mobility.

Pdq officials pulled the 15-pound battery out of its cradle so they could show how the 28-pound frame locks into a housing mounted on a standard wheelchair.

Ludovici leaned over to heft the battery, then had pdq's chair up-ended for a closer look at the housing. It takes 10 to 25 minutes to install, said Alan R. Muchmore, vice president for marketing and communications.

When he is outdoors having fun, Vincent Ross, who designed the PowerTrike, straps himself into one for a three-point parasail landing, Muchmore said. "He's mad. Quite mad," Muchmore said, with a laugh. "It takes five people to push him off a cliff."

Ludovici took the machine out for a test spin and came back with a grin.

He doubted, though, that he'd be able to snap it together while sitting in the chair, as pdq's non-handicapped demonstrators did.

"It's a little awkward. I don't have the sitting stability to do that. And I have pretty good sitting stability," he said. It also would be nice if it accelerated faster at the start, he said.

Muchmore said the British company has sold 2,000 of the $2,000 gizmos since they were introduced in May.