The wheelchair is one of the oldest and most widely used mobility aids and has gone through a lot of improvement over the last couple of years. At first it was only used in hospitals and retirement homes to transport people with mobility disabilities from place to place. Now it has come to be a self mobility aid.

Some years ago the power wheelchair was invented that allowed people in the wheelchair to propel themselves to places using battery power. It had a railing at the side of the wheel that could to be pushed forward or backward to move. Today you can get electric wheelchairs that are powered by a set of batteries that can be charged anywhere. These wheelchairs are very easy to operate by those in the wheelchair. The good thing about this is that it does not require any effort on the part of the person in the wheelchair or any other person to power it along. This is the reason you may find even elderly people in wheelchairs moving along by themselves without the need of anyone else’s help.

A new type of wheelchair has been invented that can be operated by the use of a tongue. This wheelchair enables those with serious spinal cord injuries such as quadriplegics to manoeuvre a powered wheelchair with the help of simple tongue movements. This is a clinical trial completed by the school of electrical and computer engineering at the Georgia Institute of technology.