Customer Innovation

The long-term effects of sitting in a wheelchair can be devastating: patients can get pressure ulcers and spine and muscle deformities, feel pain or are simply exhausted after up to 14 hours of sitting. Bad posture is a major challenge to them, because often wheelchair-bound patients are not able to control or change their sitting position on their own. With 132 million people in wheelchairs, this is a big problem in terms of individual's pain and high costs for the healthcare system. SAP Netherlands is working to change by developing a smart wheelchair. Created in collaboration with Dutch manufacturer of wheelchairs and mobility scooters, Life & Mobility, an advanced prototype of the smart wheelchair has integrated sensors that continually generate mass data from the patient actually sitting in it, for example the pressure distribution in the seat and backrest. Based on SAP Leonardo, these big data are collected and stored centrally in the SAP Cloud Platform and analyzed with help of SAP Analytics.