Name: How we started a company helping 500,000 people In wheelchairs
Uploaded: 2023-02-02
Duration: 12 min 57 s
Description: LUCI is changing an industry by turning “dumb wheelchairs into smart wheelchairs.”

Award-winning songwriter Barry Dean and brother Jered Dean cofounded LUCI, a company that's changing an industry by turning “dumb wheelchairs into smart wheelchairs.”

How we started a company helping 500,000 people In wheelchairs

Photograph by Ted Willis and Corey Shepherd for Fortune

Tech

LUCI is changing an industry by turning “dumb wheelchairs into smart wheelchairs.”

How LUCI is helping 500,000 people In wheelchairs

Rhiannon is active, she races in the winter special olympics every year she likes to play indoor soccer, she wants that full life. And so for her to have that full book of memories, she's got to be able to get out and do things and lucy makes it easier and easier and the easier something is, the more we can pack into a day. Lucy is truly an innovative product by the most innovative product I've seen in about 10 years that can really impact clients functionally help them to either drive a power chair where perhaps they couldn't do that at all before or certainly drive it with much better confidence, competence and safety. So it's very exciting. Were the first company in this industry to ever make a smart connected device. Our ability to push out over the air update and have lucy keep getting smarter and smarter over time is a completely new idea in this industry. So lucy is an add on accessory for a power wheelchair that turns a dumb wheelchair into a smart wheelchair. We add sensors in the brain and connectivity to the power wheelchair so that the user has increased independence. That helps not run into things. Not drive off things, connects the user to their team and to the modern world. Obviously its mission. All we're you know, we're dealing with my daughter, his niece going, we need to solve a problem and all her friends, you know that are in the same boat. She has cerebral palsy. She gets a power chair when she's maybe five or about to be five and she touched the trigger. And it the speed had not been a justice. And it took off you know six miles an hour straight into a wall and she was fine. But I then promptly parked in the garage because I was like this is too scary. I wish I could say we sat down and said we're going to start a company. It was absolutely not that it was weird solve a technical problem, build the I. P. And the prototypes and then surely there will be companies that you know that that will do this. My basement became the headquarters of lucy for a while about a year later. I think we got our first three employees and then got an actual space. But yeah Catherine's been the north star from the beginning and then we've added two and met so many amazing people. Rhiannon was born with a rare birth defect called skit successfully. So it's a development delay in the brain and it affects her motor and verbal. Um So she's highly intelligent but you know she's not able to walk. My name is I am 16. I am my high school junior with her skits and hopefully she also has spasticity. So when she's trying to make her body do something sometimes the body will go the opposite direction or her tone will kick in and she'll go full forward and you can see the scars around the house where the chair would get up against and nothing slows it down. There's a lot of injuries in the wheelchair space more than there are people having motorcycle injuries and ending up in the er, 175,000 year. People ending up in the er, because of wheelchair injuries using a power chair is actually tougher than I think a lot of people think it takes learning in order to operate this very heavy device within an environment. These wheelchairs cost as much as a car. They weigh 3 to £500 without the person in them, but there's no modern technology on them. I mean, it's really kind of a boat, battery, some wheels and a joystick. Uh and good luck. The only safety stuff on a wheelchair would be a seatbelt. I mean, we we did crash testing with one of the top independent facilities in the country and they're saying that just running into a wall in one of these chairs at full speed violates the laws set up for cars and forward crashes and there's no bumper, the knees, the feet, your toes, That's the bumper in a wheelchair. I have had some clients I've worked with who have tipped over a chair and maybe broken an arm or injured their head. So, these are very, very serious concerns, Lucy is always looking looking for the clear path and if there's no clear path, it just brings you to a stop. We're seeing now with the users, we have, we're preventing over 10,000 collisions or drop offs, tip overs every week. This is the alpha prototype, the very first prototype, March 2017. It's off the shelf sensors, just whatever I could get from spark fund and find in the garage. It proved the theory that we could do it. So we really quickly went to a beta prototype about a month later. Katherine used this data prototype for a year and a half and during that time we tracked all the data from it learned where it worked and what didn't work well. And so we took all the stuff we learned here and developed what lucy product is without today. So lucy product looks like this. We call this the smart frame and this mounts onto a power wheelchair. And so you take this smart frame mounted down there, it plugs in between the joystick or the drive method and the motors and adds multiple kinds of sensors. So we have cameras um, one on each side of the user and one in the back. And then we have our own type of ultrasonic sensor that we develop and then hidden in here and down on the foot plate of the wheelchair. We have our own proprietary millimeter wave radar. And so take all that put it on the chair and that means your chair doesn't run into things. Doesn't drive off things is connected to the modern world. You can interact with lucy through Alexa through your phone. So turns it into a modern device. So when I first heard about lucy, I have to admit the first time I heard about it all I thought this can't possibly be true. And then when I learned more about it, started seeing some videos and had a chance to finally see lucy, I was really quite amazed that it worked as well as it did. It's an extremely sophisticated system. I was also excited because I work with very complex clients and anything that I can bring to them that helps them to be more functional than they are. I'm all in. We were hoping that it would be safer but it it is so much more with all of the independence and the confidence and watching Ryan and smile as she heads out the back door by herself and just her and ninja her dog and they're just off and they're gonna go for a walk and you're just not worried. It's fantastic Lucy has given me so much confidence. I am able to be more independent and do the things I want to do. She's 16 years old, she doesn't want mom and dad looming over all the time. Now she can go act like a teenager, we have a saying internally which is, life is a team sport. We have different clinicians, we have activity, people, we have specialists involved and doctors, so we set up the, my lucy app so that people can actually set up a team and choose what information to share the right or the driver of the chair can decide. This information needs to go to my doctor. This information needs to go to my caregiver. They can share uh battery status so that an alert goes out and let people know, hey, um, you know, Katherine's at this location, her battery's low, She may get stranded soon. You might want to check in right. One of the next things that we're working on. It sounds really simple, but it's just a pressure monitor for air cushions. That's not a hard tech list. That is just a knowing that there's a problem and getting the tech into the hands of the people that need it. Now that you actually have a computer and connectivity and a smart wheelchair. It becomes a freeing device not just for mobility but also for health. One of the things I'm really excited about that we just announced is the pediatric solution. Now you can get a wheelchair for a very young child with lucy on it once kids start crawling their vision and visual perceptual skills really explode all sorts of the area areas of the brain. Just like if kids don't have this ability to have independent mobility before the age of five, it changes the whole waterfall of development of possibilities for them for their whole life. You can't get that back. I think this is going to really change a lot of people's lives. So lucy is right now getting funded by insurance and Medicaid and the V. A. But usually there's some pushback because it's new technology. So if I recommend a power chair for a client, it's being paid for by an insurance company or by a state Medicaid program or perhaps a federal Medicare program. Well, the problem is something new comes along and there's not room in our current construct for how do we deal with a truly new product once these funders see it that first time in real life, what it can do for that user, we found that people tend to flip pretty quickly to, oh this actually makes a lot of sense. I think they're starting to come around especially on the lucy device because they're starting to see what long term It actually will save them money. Rhiannon is priceless but her equipment around her is $30,000 every time she rolls out the door and goes somewhere. So you obviously you don't want it bouncing off of things. It's been an interesting learning curve for us to learn how to combine the fact that there's that passion, there's that personal need That has built a real company that's really doing things in a real market now. We're at that place of raising our first funding and doing all that and that's going very well. But it's a very different path I think than most companies go on because it's already for sale. It's already in 40 states, you know, I mean hundreds of users, a lot of people see this and it is a mission all company. We have a cause, you know, we talk about moving at the speed of the need, you know, the internally those kinds of things. But the fact of the matter is although suddenly realized this is a real incredible business opportunity as well. There's an assumption that wheelchairs are a real niche that there's not very many people using wheelchairs in the world. And that assumption is wrong. Uh, there's, you know, a million more people in wheelchairs in the US than there are electric vehicles in the US. We have a lot of these conversations about equity. But what is sometimes left off of that scale are people with disabilities. It's a broad range of people. Some of those people will require a power wheelchair to be as independent as possible. It's easy to look down upon people who are less functional than ourselves. And I think we need to remember that one of the beauties of assistive technology. One of the reasons that I enjoy assistive technology so much is it levels the playing field. So now someone who didn't have mobility before can be mobile. You look five years down the road and I think this will be um, inevitable that this technology is on every power wheelchair sold and you'll start seeing a lot of interesting new health and wellness options for wheelchair users, manual and power. There we go, Oh, now you're giving love.