How I Helped a Disabled Friend With a Cycle-By-Wire Recumbent Trike

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Engineering couldn’t cure a devastating illness, but it could still help someone cope with it.

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How I Helped a Disabled Friend With a Cycle-By-Wire Recumbent Trike IEEE Spectrum

Greg stood at the base of the tall granite crag, his climbing harness arrayed with carabiners, anchors, and rope, his ever-present Tilly hat crumpled under an orange climbing helmet. As usual, he had a flock of novice climbers in attendance, all nervous about what the day would hold. It was July of 2017, and I was one of them. The most reassuring item by far was not any of the safety gear, but the impish grin on Greg’s face, which conveyed a reassuring message: It’s okay; this will be fun; I’ve got you.

We were spending a week on California’s Pacific Crest Trail, traversing a part of the Sierras north and west of Lake Tahoe. The terrain was rugged, the weather was hot and dry, and both the fitness level and experience of the 20 people involved varied greatly. Greg was our leader.

Some context is probably useful. Every year, the American Leadership Forum curates a class of 20 to 25 people. The goal is to have people with a mélange of skills, backgrounds, and perspectives study and interact in hopes that in the end the group will be more enlightened, aware, and cohesive—and thus more capable of effecting positive change in the community.

Our cohort was typical: four civil servants, three business people, three health care professionals, three religious leaders of varied faiths, three entrepreneurs, three non-profit executive directors, two educators, and one mayor. Class XXXV was deliberately diverse in race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, and lifestyle.

Greg was not only our guide up the mountain, he was also the leader of our broader journey. Together we learned about mindfulness, aikido, compassion, drumming, the structure of cities, culture in America, and the obligation of the individual in a collective. He rang the gong, gently nudged the conversation, and slowly but surely became a trusted and dear friend.

One night I was helping with dinner preparation after a long day on the trail. Greg sat down next to me and began massaging his right arm. He was one of the most vigorous people I knew—whether biking, hiking, or climbing—so I assumed he just had a bit of muscle soreness. I asked him about it, and he said that it had been bothering him for a few weeks. Greg went on to say that he had a surgical procedure scheduled to address the underlying pinched nerve when he returned home to Oregon.

I didn’t see Greg for a couple of months, until well after his surgery. Greg’s disease progressed quickly. The next time I saw him he couldn’t lift either arm and needed assistance balancing. His daughter moved home to accompany him on select work assignments, but it was clear that his life as an independent person was drawing to a close.

Being an engineer, a tech entrepreneur, and most recently a venture capitalist, I was maddeningly unqualified to assist with anything medical. But I felt compelled nonetheless to try and improve Greg’s quality of life. My initial idea was vague: to help Greg regain a bit of independence and get him back into the outdoors, where in the past he had so thrived.

After I ruminated for a few days, a solution began to emerge. I would build Greg a recumbent Tricycle that could accommodate his declining abilities. It would be a trike rather than a bike, so balance wouldn’t be needed. It would be electrified to augment his weakened but still functioning leg muscles. And (here’s where my special contribution came it), it would have joystick controls, because his only remaining granular dexterity was in two fingers on his left hand. A higher-order goal was to create an integrated solution that was simple to operate and maintain, so that he’d be able to use it as much as possible.

After researching the various recumbent trikes available, I settled on a frame from Inspired Cycle Engineering (ICE) in the UK. I chose the company’s “Adventure” model which has underslung steering linkages, and a fairly traditional drum brake setup. I ordered one, which showed up at my doorstep three weeks later.

At this early point of the design phase, I enlisted some help from Greg, who was very clear about the extent and nature of his disability. The right side of his body was almost completely impaired, but the large muscle groups in the shoulders still functioned and would remain working for the longest time in the future. We settled on the idea that gear selection would somehow be controlled by a shift of his shoulder. Steering and braking would be handled by two fingers on his left hand.

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My original idea for shifting was to adapt an electronic derailleur from Shimano—the company’s Di2 system. But I discovered that it was totally proprietary, which would have made it difficult to reverse engineer. Fortunately, I found a company in California named Archer Components that sells a system to automate a manual derailleur. It comes complete with ...

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