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Friday, July 10, 2009

The Access - universal weight machine

The Access is a universally accessible weight machine, in the running for the James Dyson Award.

The Access was inspired by the difficulty, after the designer saw a man in a wheelchair arrive at a gym, with a bag full of homemade gadgets attached to the back of his chair. In the following hour and a half he spent more time fiddling with the equipment and getting in and out of the chair than he did working out. Surely, he wasn't alone: Almost no gyms have equipment for the handicapped.

The designer's still anonymous, because the design itself is competing for the James Dyson Award, a global competition to find the cleverest student-designed concepts (after the spirit of Sir James and his ubiquitous vacuum). The Access has two arms that extend laterally, and which can rotate up to 180 degrees, each independently. That allows anyone to configure it to their specific need:

via fastcompany.com

A video is shown below.



The entry is in second place and voting is still open - -entries are all now online, and by registering, you can vote for the best (and worst) until July 20th.

1 comment:

Katja said...

Thanks for posting this! Now if these things would just miraculously appear in gyms all over the world...

In the meantime, how do you reach the bar on the lat machine without a helper? Anybody got any ideas?