Team's solar-powered wheelchair wins World Cerebral Palsy Day competition

Javascript is currently disabled in your web browser. For full site functionality, it is necessary to enable Javascript. In order to enable it, please see these instructions. 2 hours ago The team's solar-powered wheelchair includes solar panels that are easily deployed and stored, providing nearly unlimited range at low speeds.

A student team at the University of Virginia's School of Engineering and Applied Science won first place in the 2012 World Cerebral Palsy Day "Change My World in One Minute" competition for its design of a solar-powered wheelchair with retractable panels.

Seventeen million people worldwide live with cerebral palsy, a permanent disability that affects movement ranging from a weakness in one hand to an almost complete lack of voluntary movement.

World Cerebral Palsy Day was established in 2012 with an invitation for people with CP, their families and friends to post ideas online for something that could be created, developed or modified that would change the world for someone with a disability. Ideas were posted as text or video, with the specification that each idea could take only one minute to read or watch.

In early September, people were encouraged to go online, review the submitted ideas and vote for the concepts that could have the greatest impact on people's lives and more than 5,800 votes were cast for the 473 ideas submitted.

At the end of September, the World CP Day Panel reviewed the ideas and the public votes and selected three ideas to be shortlisted for development: a fold-up motorized wheelchair, a documentary on cerebral palsy in the 21st century and a wheelchair with solar power.

Social activists, researchers, inventors and innovators were then invited to turn the shortlisted ideas into reality.

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"Our team worked closely together to come up with a solution for this challenging engineering problem in a very limited time," said graduate student Dennis L. Waldron III, a member of the U.Va. team. "Although not required for the competition, we chose to build a prototype to test our design, and refined or completely changed certain aspects as we built, sometimes multiple times."

The winners were announced April 27 at United Cerebral Palsy's International Conference in San Diego, with U.Va.'s first-place entry receiving $20,000 from a total prize pool of $25,000.

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Team's solar-powered wheelchair wins World Cerebral Palsy Day competition