Hardly a day goes by where I don’t receive an email touting an upcoming or ongoing Kickstarter campaign for some sort of SCI-related crowdfunding project. In just a few years, crowdfunding has emerged as one of the most popular ways to launch new products. I honestly don’t know whether this is a good thing or not, but it does seem to provide added visibility for aspiring inventors and some of their ideas, so that can’t be all bad.

A couple of weeks ago, I posted on the Levaté chair lift and mentioned that the team behind it had planned a Kickstarter. Well, that Kickstarter has finally gone live. If you were intrigued by the idea of a portable seat elevator for your manual chair, you can donate or find out more here.

Going back even farther, I posted about the Freedom Chair, a durable, all-terrain chair designed with portability and ease of repair in mind. At the time the Freedom Chair was mainly being built and used in developing countries to help people living in inaccessible areas who had limited access to (or use for) normal wheelchairs. Well, now the team of MIT engineers behind the chair has launched a Kickstarter.

For proof the crowdfunding approach can work, you need look no further than the QuadStick. In the May New Mobility, I wrote about the Kickstarter that helped launch Fred Davison’s groundbreaking sip and puff controlled videogame joystick. Now, six months later, the QuadStick website is up and running and the QuadStick is out in the wild.

If you come across any cool crowdfunded projects you’d like to see on GearCrip, send them to iruder@unitedspinal.org.