We recently met someone with cerebral palsy from birth. It was very humbling to see the daily challenges faced by his mother, specially the physical lifting from wheelchair to bed and vice versa. This is just not scalable so it got me thinking about a mechanical solution.
The Hoyer Lift is a standard equipment in the market but pretty much out of budget for most middle class households. They usually have an electric winch and cost around INR 70k.
A standard bottle jack to lift cars has 5000kg capacity and costs around INR 1000-1500 so I was able to put together a basic lift using locally available 2" square tubing and some 3/16" plates. Given the position of ram arm and pivot, it should be able to lift 1000kg. I might tweak it to have more vertical travel at the expense of some lifting capacity.
Got some suit fabric and made a basic rectangular piece with loops at the corners as a harness. I was able to lift myself so I think this should work, just need to make some minor tweaks.
Total material cost came around INR 5k.
Gave this prototype to FOKE (Friends of Kolkata's Elderly, foke.in) to test in their Charunibash home, so that I can improve it based on real world usage feedback.
