Hi, everyone.
I'm a C-1 quad with no functional sparing and I've been using sip & puff wheelchairs since 1985. I started out in E&J chairs and then 20'ish years ago bought a Permobil C500. The electronics were nothing to write home about but I harped until they agreed to help me tweak the programming. We spent most of a Friday in the parking in front of their place but finally got the thing handling satisfactorily. I was pretty good at the sip & puff thing and over the years learned to make the chair work for me very well. About five years later I bought another C500 because there's no way I'm lying in bed as my chair gets fixed. I put a lot of miles on my chairs but it's mostly walking my giant schnauzer, running around the country on vacation or at Virginia football/basketball/baseball games. I don't sit around much but don't put my chairs through a whole lot of rough stuff, and I take care of my equipment so my pair of Permobils has been very durable.
The main electronics module in my oldest chair died about six months ago and I was told I either had to buy a new module or ship the module back to the factory that they had found lying around the shop and installed in my chair. The issue was that the module was not programmed to for the ability to use "Latch Mode," and according to the techs at National Seating and Mobility that could only be changed by the manufacturer. I didn't quite believe that but my chairs were pushing two decades of service and were just wearing out all around, so I decided to get a couple new ones.
Few months later I had $41,000-worth of brand new F5. I had to change a bunch of stuff before I could even get in the chair, like add a top strap and have a machine shop alter the left armrest so I could take it off. I use a Buch board to get in and out of the chair and the armrests on the F5 aren't removable so I got that fixed. Three guys came out a coupla weeks later to help me program the chair, as it was sluggish, inaccurate and not responsive at all. So we got into it, and to make a long story short, Curtiss-Wright had removed the ability to slow a chair down from the sip & puff software when in Cruise mode. You could speed up, but you couldn't slow down again. Your only option was to come to a complete stop.
I went ballistic. Not only did that make zero sense, it was utterly stupid. What possible reason could CW have for taking away such a basic and necessary element of movement from people who are so extremely limited in their movement options in the first place? I mean, it may seem like a small thing to most folks but this change is crippling to people who are already severely crippled. Their answer to the problem is "step mode," a "feature" that lets you speed up or slow down in five steps. The problem with that is that you get 20% of your total speed with each step and the only way to get slower on the bottom end is to reduce the top end speed of the chair. You get 20% regardless, so you have a choice of either a chair you can handle a little more decently in close quarters but runs at a max speed 2-3 mph slower or you keep your top speed. What kind of a choice is that?
They have an answer for that too, and the answer is "profiles," one with slow steps for indoors and one that gives you top speed. But I have to ask, have you ever heard of a more kludgy hack of an excuse of a solution for ANYTHING than that? How do you think the bright people who create these designs would change their tune if the decisions they made for those of us with no choice but to use their equipment meant they had to operate under the same stupid rules they impose on us when they want to move? I bet they'd think twice if they spent three minutes walking around and had to stop every they changed speeds or spend ten minutes scrolling through menus to change their mobility profile every time they go in or out the front door? I haven't had an opportunity to try it out yet, but I can easily foresee that this change to the electronics is going to make it nigh impossible for me to operate in a crowd. When I'm in the crush after a ball game I speed up and slow down constantly and without thinking, often at a fraction of one MPH.
After a little investigation the stupidity of this design decision became a lot easier to understand. Curtiss-Wright is an international conglomerate that makes hundreds of millions of dollars selling aircraft carriers and nuclear power plants. (I didn't waste my time digging but that's what their website suggests.) They sure as heck didn't buy wheelchair electronics to go into the wheelchair electronics business. The only thing I can figure is that the wheelchair electronics had some technology in it that they wanted so they bought it and are letting the rest rot. I'd say it was sad if it wasn't so infuriating. The old E&J sip & puff electronics were lightyears ahead of the crap they hacked onto Permobil two decades ago and now they've nerfed it even more. 32 years and sip & puff wheelchair electronics has done nothing but spiral in a steady decline.
I have a lot more to say about the F5 and wheelchair design as it relates to my experience so far with the chair but some of that belongs in other topics and this is way too long already for anyone to read. If anybody has made it this far, I would like to ask: Does anyone know if deceleration in cruise mode is something I can reprogram or has it been coded out of the software all together?
Thanks moocho.
-Shan