This resembles ascending a rope using prusiks, which is a lot of fun if you haven't tried it. Great to see a variation the helps people with limited mobility to get around unassisted.
You do the same thing with prusiks to ascend a rope. Here's an example of a practical application, getting out a crevasse when climbing glaciers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=px_m3qzHYTA
In an alpine scenario you'd descend by rappelling. I doubt folks in a home want to setup a munter hitch or similar though. :)
This is how it’s taught in intro mountaineering courses. In the real world experienced alpinists carry a lightweight ascender, like a Micro Traction or similar, that can also be used for other tasks like hauling or fall protection for simul-leading.
It is a bit more complex. Climbing means falling. The 'ratchet' needs to work under shock loads. And wet/ice ropes radically change the friction numbers. There is a reason why climbers, experienced ones, know and use a great many different tricks for accending and decending ropes. A "big wall" climber can make a belay device out of almost anything, or even nothing.
I see. I tried to watch one video but they spent most of the time explaining how to create the rope/knots. I had assumed you eventually resorted to your arm strength to ratchet up the line. It does look like standing to ascend.
> Descending is a bit challenging for my brain to understand.
You would typically descend by rappelling, but it is possible to descend using two prussiks:
1. weight prussik B / unweight prussik A
2. slide prussik A down
3. weight prussik A / unwieght prussik B
4. slide prussik B down
5. repeat
I've never seen this done with two prussiks, but a similar sort of thing is done with two ascenders when rope soloing (e.g., to practice a single move over and over without re-rigging each time).
You can also do this by wrapping the rope around your foot. As you hoist up, let the rope around your foot go loose, then stand on your foot to go up again.
Haha! I though the same thing. I remember watching a video of an amputee ascending up El Cap using a similar set up only with lots of pull-ups! That and less of a Danish modern design aesthetic!
I wonder if there any zoning rules in many parts of the world that prevent adoption of this. Also what would it end up costing (has to be less than an elevator). But I love the idea that it is a super simple solution to those with disabilities and looks like an easy install.
In case anyone else was irritated by the inability to scrub through the auto-playing video, adding this CSS rule in your browser's dev tools should fix it:
It's infuriating, I can't rewatch a part I missed or skip ahead? And there's no volume control? I can't believe designers still are removing critical functionality to make it "cleaner".
Everyone knows that when you skin the video element, oops I err mean, craft a custom video player, the first thing you simply must do is hide the default controls.
Otherwise how will people know it's a custom video player
I had a 2016 MBP for a while and never noticed it once. Interesting how we all get set in particular set of usage patterns. I might have liked it more if I'd ever even noticed that. Maybe it wasn't something that was as exposed in 2016?
I've never seen it not work. It even works for embedded audio, like alert beeps. I'm sure YouTube had some way to stop you using it on ads, but I block those anyway.
Thank you. The lab that developed this set the video to be only viewable when embedded on their site, and my privacy tools mean vimeo thinks the video isn't being loaded via their site.
Absolutely baffling that they don't allow it to be viewed directly on vimeo.
...Almost as baffling as a video that is several minutes long and doesn't communicate in the slightest how the thing works.
> Almost as baffling as a video that is several minutes long and doesn't communicate in the slightest how the thing works.
This right there. Why is this even here? It feels like I'm A/B testing a launch campaign and I got the version where you need to figure shit out on your own
Incredible to see such a new device in a space where there has been little real invention in 100 years (since the elevator/lift).
I'm interested in the building code implications of this. I assume you can't replace a staircase with this due to fire egress requirements, and at the top you have to have some sort of complex gate (notably not shown in the video) to prevent people from falling off.
I don't see it as a replacement for stairs, it's too impractical for general use. The only use case seems to be for what their demo video shows, people with limited mobility.
It's of those technologies so obvious, I don't understand why it's new. Often that signals genius or my ignorance:
Why now? Often the answer is, another tech's development enabled this one. Is that the case? They say here only:
> Vertical Walking is a new system to move yourself between floors in a building. By exploiting the potential of the human body and materials, only a fraction of effort is required, compared to taking stairs. No external energy is needed.
Maybe they use a capacitor? When going down, brakes store energy that supplements muscle power when going up? If that's the design, why not do it 20 or 40 years ago?
Perhaps it replaces stairs in constrained footprints, like dense urban housing, where stairs consume high proportions of space.
This seems too unpowered to be the best option in places with reliable electric power, and for places without reliable electric power, this looks too complex to be reliably repaired without a service infrastructure. And if you have that, you probably have reliable electric power. In short, it looks like a solution looking for a problem.
It probably isn't though. My mother in law's stairlift was installed in a couple of hours along the normal stairs. There was no building work to create a shaft needed. It was cheap.
You don't have 80cm between normal floor joists so installation in a regular house could be complex and expensive. If you are designing a multistory new build specifically for the elderly leaving a space for a solution like this to be installed/uninstalled in the future could be added to building standards.
as the website itself points out one of the explicit purposes is to keep people moving and exercising. Keeping people mobile (like the MS affected woman in the clip) is a great idea.
One of the worst things for people who are already impaired is to be overly sedentary because it accelerates function loss. It doesn't surprise me at all that this is coming out of the Netherlands by the way, a country that has a strong culture of keeping people healthy and active.
yes, the Netherlands is a beacon of human-scale and human-oriented urban development (https://www.youtube.com/c/NotJustBikes documents this really well) and this invention fits in nicely with that perspective.
This is probably an order of magnitude less expensive to install than anything that requires power. Also a lot of people might not have as reliable power as they think (see Austin last winter).
If you can use something less complex with fewer requirements that’s usually better. Do the simplest thing that solves the problem.
I can't help but think about what happens when the poor ladies arm strength starts to diminish from MS and she is left with the whole installation rigged into her home.
This reminds me a lot of a video of a retired man that uses his new free time moving large objects just by leveraging gravity. I can't find it right now but I think that there's a potential there for new ways movement just like the vertiwalk.
Tangentially this made me think of a video I saw on the bbc about container sized houses that expand and build them selves using counter levers https://youtu.be/phJNZRr8Qoo
Fair points. For 1, I’d think this would be for use with one person so it would always be “with” them on the floor where they are. But It would be interesting to know if it would disengage to go down or up if needed (though you’d likely need help).
I know the video said she could go up but down down steps, but I’d think she’d need to go up and down on the device.
Fun side story - I once rode a stair chair in my sisters house half way, got bored, got off and walked the rest of the way up the steps to her basement. The stair chair only charged when at either end station (the designers hadn’t planned for it to stop in the middle I guess), so the battery died. It was hundreds of dollars to fix (either new battery or repair tech) and didn’t have a neutral, so it stayed half way up the steps until they got around to taking it out.
I used to work a lot in health care.
In the trenches as a simple grunt and later on in the etappe, IT.
Lately still some work in BI for health insurance.
So pitch me, why should they fund it, when there are exoskeleton support systems in a lot of variety and price ranges I can use everywhere just around the corner?
I don't mean to be rude, but this is the type and tone of questions I sometimes get paid to ask.
It's fundamentally different from an exoskeleton support system because it's a fixture of the building itself. It's a public utility, not a private suit.
That would be dodging to answer my question, which would be a red flag.
The question was, why fund a system, that is intended to support, train, maintain and strengthen existing skills of physically challenged and not some others that may or may not be superior?
It's quite simple, people do it everyday.
They ask themselves, what do I get for the money and why should I give it to them?
> I don't mean to be rude, but this is the type and tone of questions I sometimes get paid to ask.
If other people pay you to be rude to them, that's between you and them. But that doesn't mean rudeness is welcome in all contexts, and this site is one where it isn't.
As far as the pitch, it seems to me that the video is the pitch. I'm sure if you were actually in a position to fund their work they'd be happy to talk it through with you in more detail. To me this system looks a lot less expensive than an exoskeleton, and is also much closer to practical realization.
So it's exoskeletons just around the corner.
And they can be carried around, so haven't to be build into that corner.
You may do your own cost comparisons for funding purposes considering the wider market for exoskeleton systems in logistics, construction, etc.
So this is just one example, there are a lot more different exoskeleton systems available.
Now I just have to look up, whether there are already studies, that tell me about probable health-promoting physiotherapeutic effects.
If you've been around a loved one who is at risk of a fall on stairs, or exhausted and weary from stairs due to age or disease, this apparatus's appeal is immediately clear.
When my mom was dying from brain cancer, her final days of mobility were an incredible strain for everyone. This would have made life a lot easier. If she had a seizure, at least she would be seated. If she got tired, taking a break wouldn't mean potentially falling and getting hurt.
Yea, this is a very cool apparatus! When my 80 y/o grandmother had a stroke she went from walking 3+ miles a day to barely being able to walk around the block. She still had the drive to use her muscles as she could but she lived in a three-story house and the stairs were terrifying (though we were lucky enough to have a lot of family that could help out)… something like this would have done wonders for her both physically and mentally.
Yeah. Stairs are scary. My able bodied middle aged partner fainted halfway down the stairs, and damn, you know, uh, you don’t forget something like that, even though she only mildly fractured her spine and just was in a lot of pain but “fine”
Keep in mind that in the Netherlands, where this business is located, the government will pay to install a stairwell elevator in your home when you are no longer able to use them yourself. This product seems very niche in comparison.
I think Vertiwalk might be a solution for people who want to exercise. But if the main issue is to travel between floors, I think installing your own mini elevator might be a better solution. It doesn't take much more space, but it's fast and can carry the wheel chair with you:
Probably, but it'll be vastly too expensive for most folks. I imagine the construction costs are greater than devices that use the stairwell due to design and anyone that lives in a rental or otherwise cannot do the construction are out of luck.
Elevators of any kind start at the price of a mid-price car and quickly spiral in to the hundreds of thousands of dollars, depending on certifications and local ordinances. San Francisco has seismic sensor/seismic stop requirements on top of regular elevators, for example. There is a reason why almost no homes have elevators despite the technology being over a century old.
Beyond the cost issue mentioned by others, the exercise element that you mention is maybe more important than you think - older folk often fare better if they can stay active, and this might be a subtle way to provide that.
Also there's the physical size - 80cm x 80cm - retrofitting an elevator into a small property has some serious space demands.
>older folk often fare better if they can stay active
I can directly vouch for that, in an anecdotal way. My mother, in her last months, fought through immense pain to do her daily activities. After a four day stay in the hospital for a heart-related issue, she was never able to walk unassisted again.
An average stairwell is not quite wide enough to accommodate a stairlift, so I don’t think it’s a great general solution. You also still have the issue of transferring in and out of the chair, which can be an issue for some people. I bought a house on the premise that I could install a chairlift if needed … and had to sell the house a few years later when it turned out that the stairwell really wasn’t wide enough for it. (The chair would’ve been majorly in the way of the able-bodied people who also needed the stairs.) Admittedly, I should have done better due diligence.
It depends on the stairlift model, there are very compact versions, the kind with two or three pipes as guide take some 15-20 cm of the width of the stairs, and usually (not always) the chair/seat (which is foldable) can be "diverted" laterally.
About the 80 cm space required by this Vertiwalk thingy, it is roughly what a mini-elevator would need.
There is a (specific) pneumatic mini-lift that is 75 cm diameter:
I think they solve different problems. It doesn’t seem to me like the woman in the video would’ve been able to get upstairs as quickly or even at all, with the assistep. Especially moving upstairs with it seems very dangerous if there is a chance that your feet don’t do what you want them to.
Side note: “upstairs” is a great word that shows how ingrained stairs are in our lives as a means to move up or down. The Vertiwalk people have really thought outside of the box. Very cool.
Now, that thing looks good, easier to maintain and cheaper.
And there seems to be bigger potential adaptability.
Something along the line of modular extensions for special disabilities.
Part of the issue of the woman in the video is that her left side isn't working well due to MS, while her legs/feet are working pretty fine. The assistep does not seem to solve her problem, and also seems like it would still be risky to use.
In small houses I have always thought that stairs take up so much space for something which is used a couple of times a day. I have always thought a vertical solution would be better. This isn’t that solution for a variety of reasons. It is nice to see innovation in this area though.
I wonder if a faster solution for more able-bodied people would be, instead of having a platform for sitting and a platform for standing, you could have two small platforms, one for each foot.
It’d be essentially like walking up stairs, but on the spot.
I thought the same as the comment you are replying to, because having your hands free is quite a big deal. I practice parkour, and have zero problems with ladders from a mobility perspective, but they are not practical because you can't carry things up and down easily. Also, what if someone else comes for a visit? They better be ready to climb!
You can bring things up with a backpack. But yeah, it's less convenient than stairs, it looks worse and it is less inviting. That's why people like stairs. I'm not sure if the advertised product is that much better, though. It seems extremely slow and clunky.
Haha, okay good point, what I proposed is pretty much an overly complex ladder isn’t it. In my defence, unlike a ladder it would allow you to stand straight up and - as the other comment mentioned - use your arms for other things.
193 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 70.6 ms ] threadThe video for the Vertiwalk looks to me more like standing and sitting in order to ascend.
In standing the seat climbs up a bit to follow your bum, when sitting the floor climbs up a bit to raise your legs into a seated position.
Descending is a bit challenging for my brain to understand.
In an alpine scenario you'd descend by rappelling. I doubt folks in a home want to setup a munter hitch or similar though. :)
“The leader must not fall.”
You would typically descend by rappelling, but it is possible to descend using two prussiks:
1. weight prussik B / unweight prussik A
2. slide prussik A down
3. weight prussik A / unwieght prussik B
4. slide prussik B down
5. repeat
I've never seen this done with two prussiks, but a similar sort of thing is done with two ascenders when rope soloing (e.g., to practice a single move over and over without re-rigging each time).
Dutch.
Otherwise how will people know it's a custom video player
Realisation 2: you could trap scroll events and implement the whole thing in-browser.
...hmmmm, interesting...
Lots of sites that refuse to use standard video embedding, and my intuition says those would block the scrubber.
Makes me want to dig in and reverse engineer it
Ron: What like yin and Yan?
Richard: No like yin and yang
Ron: No it’s ying and Yang they’re opposites
Eats shoots and leaves!
Absolutely baffling that they don't allow it to be viewed directly on vimeo.
...Almost as baffling as a video that is several minutes long and doesn't communicate in the slightest how the thing works.
This right there. Why is this even here? It feels like I'm A/B testing a launch campaign and I got the version where you need to figure shit out on your own
I'm interested in the building code implications of this. I assume you can't replace a staircase with this due to fire egress requirements, and at the top you have to have some sort of complex gate (notably not shown in the video) to prevent people from falling off.
Why now? Often the answer is, another tech's development enabled this one. Is that the case? They say here only:
> Vertical Walking is a new system to move yourself between floors in a building. By exploiting the potential of the human body and materials, only a fraction of effort is required, compared to taking stairs. No external energy is needed.
Maybe they use a capacitor? When going down, brakes store energy that supplements muscle power when going up? If that's the design, why not do it 20 or 40 years ago?
Perhaps it replaces stairs in constrained footprints, like dense urban housing, where stairs consume high proportions of space.
> you can see that it's a simple system
It looks simple to operate, but if you mean it's simple to design or construct, what do you see?
Literally worthless hero video on the linked site.
Moreover, it doesn’t have a reset mechanism, in case you’ve used it and gone upstairs, and then someone else needs to use it.
It also requires carving a vertical shaft into your house, so that you can place the equipment.
People should ask Zack about the system he installed for his wife: https://youtu.be/aqMZfQODJZo
I foresee buying one.
If cantilevering from rails on one side is impractical, make it detach from the opposite rail at the top/bottom and swing out of the way.
One of the worst things for people who are already impaired is to be overly sedentary because it accelerates function loss. It doesn't surprise me at all that this is coming out of the Netherlands by the way, a country that has a strong culture of keeping people healthy and active.
If you can use something less complex with fewer requirements that’s usually better. Do the simplest thing that solves the problem.
Taking the stairs can be awful when you are impaired and falling down stairs just adds new injuries to your problems.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160302003628/http://www.thefor...
https://coralcastle.com/whos-ed/
My questions (because the YouTube video doesn't show it):
1. What happens if the "chair" is at the opposite end? E.g. you're downstairs and want to go up but the "chair" is upstairs.
2. Is the step gap / velocity adjustable?
I know the video said she could go up but down down steps, but I’d think she’d need to go up and down on the device.
Fun side story - I once rode a stair chair in my sisters house half way, got bored, got off and walked the rest of the way up the steps to her basement. The stair chair only charged when at either end station (the designers hadn’t planned for it to stop in the middle I guess), so the battery died. It was hundreds of dollars to fix (either new battery or repair tech) and didn’t have a neutral, so it stayed half way up the steps until they got around to taking it out.
2. Looks like it. I think it's just a racheting system, so I think there are infinite "lock points"
So pitch me, why should they fund it, when there are exoskeleton support systems in a lot of variety and price ranges I can use everywhere just around the corner?
I don't mean to be rude, but this is the type and tone of questions I sometimes get paid to ask.
The question was, why fund a system, that is intended to support, train, maintain and strengthen existing skills of physically challenged and not some others that may or may not be superior?
It's quite simple, people do it everyday. They ask themselves, what do I get for the money and why should I give it to them?
And you know that.
If other people pay you to be rude to them, that's between you and them. But that doesn't mean rudeness is welcome in all contexts, and this site is one where it isn't.
As far as the pitch, it seems to me that the video is the pitch. I'm sure if you were actually in a position to fund their work they'd be happy to talk it through with you in more detail. To me this system looks a lot less expensive than an exoskeleton, and is also much closer to practical realization.
https://rewalk.com/blog/rewalk-enters-contract-with-bkk-mobi...
So it's exoskeletons just around the corner. And they can be carried around, so haven't to be build into that corner. You may do your own cost comparisons for funding purposes considering the wider market for exoskeleton systems in logistics, construction, etc. So this is just one example, there are a lot more different exoskeleton systems available.
Now I just have to look up, whether there are already studies, that tell me about probable health-promoting physiotherapeutic effects.
Robotic exoskeletons: The current pros and cons
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6153133/
Of course you more often need upper limb or back support systems, they are much cheaper:
https://exoskeletonreport.com/product-category/exoskeleton-c...
So, there you go.
To strain the metaphor.
When my mom was dying from brain cancer, her final days of mobility were an incredible strain for everyone. This would have made life a lot easier. If she had a seizure, at least she would be seated. If she got tired, taking a break wouldn't mean potentially falling and getting hurt.
You have to assume children share the space for instance.
Then how useful practically. I guess you have two wheel chairs.
And how replaceable it is when your condition gets worse.
Interesting idea. I feel like once you pay for a builder you might not install something that simple.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqMZfQODJZo
I can directly vouch for that, in an anecdotal way. My mother, in her last months, fought through immense pain to do her daily activities. After a four day stay in the hospital for a heart-related issue, she was never able to walk unassisted again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stairlift
Should be around five to ten thousand Dollar. Or you lease one for the rest of your life for about 50-100$ per month. You do the math.
The electric stair climber wheelchairs are unlikely to be a competitor because of their price. But still some believe in them.
https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/scewo-wheelchair-can...
https://www.scewo.com/en/
But than again, people like do believe in many things.
About the 80 cm space required by this Vertiwalk thingy, it is roughly what a mini-elevator would need.
There is a (specific) pneumatic mini-lift that is 75 cm diameter:
https://www.vacuumelevators.com/home-elevators/
Of course this is not suited for a wheel chair, the passenger must be standing, you need 1,30/1,40 m to be wheelchair accessible.
Side note: “upstairs” is a great word that shows how ingrained stairs are in our lives as a means to move up or down. The Vertiwalk people have really thought outside of the box. Very cool.
Thank you.
It’d be essentially like walking up stairs, but on the spot.
I'm sure I use the stairs a lot more than a couple of times a day.
Same name and a Netherlands connection. SAme company?
The website vertiwalk.com was registered in 2016, around the date of this video. Did this come to market? It certainly looks useful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternoster_lift