Trekinetic founder Mike Spindle started out with a mission to create a modern, more capable wheelchair that would be super-light and accommodate people with a range of disabilities, weights and ages.
He wanted the chair to be suitable for both outdoor and indoor use and that any adaptations could be done by the owner without the need for tools or expertise.
He set himself the extra challenge of designing the new chair himself without looking at how other wheelchairs, manual or powered, were made or had been developed.
The journey to reinvent the wheelchair was not straightforward. There were setbacks and complicated engineering hurdles that Spindle needed to overcome.
Eventually, in 2006, he launched a wheelchair that is tailored to each customer’s personal needs. It is light years away from conventional wheelchairs and his company has won many awards for the chair design.
It arguably creates the lightest powered wheelchairs on the market and each one can be easily disassembled and fit into a standard, unadapted car.
Spindle’s decision to bring the traditional wheelchair’s large wheels to the front means that the wheelchair can go through most soft ground and over obstacles.
It can transform lives by enabling people to go across difficult terrain, such as countryside or a beach, without needing someone to push or drag them out of trouble.
Perhaps the most striking difference when looking at the Trekinetic wheelchair and what existed before is the integrated set-up.
The chair is built around a carbon fibre seat that is moulded to the shape of the user so that the right-angle shape of a standard chair becomes curved, changing the pressure-loading and making it more comfortable.
A powered version of the chair was placed on the market in 2014 and now accounts for four out of five sales.
Most owners of Trekinetic wheelchairs get stopped in the street by people struck by the futuristic design.
The Science Museum has further helped raise the profile by having several K2s for visitor hire and main characters in both the 2016 film Assassin’s Creed and the 2017 sci-fi film MindGamers used the chair.
