Hal already had a bike store – Bike Rack - when he started making special bicycles for disabled children.

Jacob can’t walk. But Hal always thought he should be able to ride a bike. “Riding a bike is such an important rite of passage for many children”, the inventor explained.

So the father created a bicycle with an upright seat, a harness, pedal straps, to keep both the rider and the feet in the right place. He customized it for Jacob, and since 1997, he started fabricating and selling these bicycles for disabled kids.

Jago, now five, fell into the pond at their family home when he was eleven months old. He is a wheelchair user, and is unable to speak and eat solids.

While Lyn was taking care of her son, she realized how the regular clothes were not appropriate for Jago.

Due to his condition, Jake struggles to dress himself everyday. So Lucy stepped in, and started by designing him a pair of trousers that her cousin could put on using only one hand.

This would be the start of her “Seated Design” collection. “Now I laugh at them, they’re are like magnetic trousers, they are so funny," she said about Jake’s trousers. "That was my first trial”.

This clothing line features new techniques of textile arrangements, fastening, buttoning and special joint arrangements for elbows and knees.

Angus created this website in 2015 out of his personal experience, after he travelled the world and found out there were almost no information available for disabled people.

These comics feature a superhero who is also on a wheelchair, and whose powers come from her disability.

“The project began when Emily, my daughter, was three, and now she's nine. We searched and searched, and we just couldn't find anything in entertainment industry that related to her. So I decided to create it", he explained.

Dan quit his job to work as a full time artist, and hopes he can make a dent in the traditional way media show superheroes by making the disable community see that also them can be the heroes, and empower them.

After observing her uncle, Mileha noted that it was easier for her uncle to go up and down the stairs than to walk on flat ground.

Being a designer, she started to think of a solution for this problem.

Even after being diagnosed with diabetes type 1, Frans kept being very activate and doing sports. But after talking with other diabetics, he realized that a lot of them didn’t do sports because they were afraid of running into hypoglycemia. This made him figure that people were not well informed, and they weren’t managing their condition in the best way.

First, in 1997, he founded his own company, which involved publishing material (magazines, scientific books) for patients and health professionals.

The Nospill is a spill-proof cup to prevent people who have tremors from spilling their drinks. The invention is curved inward at the top to deflect the liquid back inside the cup in the event of a tremor. It also has a larger-than-normal handle.

“I made sure to make the cup something someone would actually want to use in public, rather than creating an antiseptic medical device that would make one feel more self-conscious. It looks like a cup that could be used by any clumsy person — and that makes it much more comforting for a person with Parkinson's to use”, Mileha explained.

“Waterskiing is fantastically exhilarating. It is something that, as a disabled person, you can get a lot out of. I was frustrated at the time that the blind slalom wasn’t a very good simulation of the able-bodied slalom”, the inventor confessed.

Being an engineer, Chris decided to take action and solve the problem on his own by creating a low cost audio slalom.

He used the sensor of a laser printer, the sound generator from a car anti-theft alarm and a cheap microprocessor to build an audio slalom.

Being blind since age seven, Victor used his resources at the university where he was studying to find himself a solution.

It became a problem for him when, in 2004, the student had to read maps of the Earth’s upper atmosphere, when he had to do that task for his doctoral work, and he realized he wasn’t able to do it due to his condition.

The software has an image-to-speech feature that reads aloud the numerical values of the x and y coordinates as well as the value associated with a color at any given point on the image or map.

Being blind himself, Chris thinks that the options for the blind to navigate on the web could be improved.

"To use a screenreader you have to understand the visual paradigm - what dialogue boxes are, radio buttons and all the rest. That's the wrong model as far as I'm concerned - what you really want is a model that is intrinsically orientated towards a one-dimensional audio stream”, he explained.

“IndeeLift was founded to help solve a real problem. Many people fall and are unable to get up from the floor. The last couple of years of his life were pretty tough. He fell many times and it became a major ordeal to get him up from the floor. This problem serendipitously lead me to develop a solution to address his problem. The Human Floor Lift can help others who fall and are unable to get up from the floor without assistance”, the inventor explained.

Since it was hard for him to get his mother on the shower, who was afraid of getting wet, he invented a portable shower. He later found out that this solution can also help other people.

"If you're disabled and you're a vet, the first thing you want to do when you get out of the hospital is take a shower. But we're not prepared to take care of vets coming home with a missing leg (or something like that). This makes the transition a whole lot easier", the inventor explained.

Biju is an electrician who got frustrated by having his legs paralyzed, and being unable to work like before. Also inspired by seeing, on the television, that the sophisticated US President’s plane was being navigated by the pilot just by using one hand, with only a few fingers, he decided to take action.

“I got hooked to the idea of having small movements controlling big things”, he explained.

So he started talking with car mechanics, and building prototypes to find a way to drive a car using only one hand.

Due to her condition, Roberta cannot walk, and has difficulty swallowing and controlling the movements of her head and neck, so she has to wear a brace. Fabio developed the device because Roberta was always crying while using the conventional support, provided by the insurance, which was hurting her.

After two years, the father, who works in a high tech company, came up with a prototype, created at home, by himself.

Because of his condition, Thomas wouldn’t be able to spend hours playing Minecraft, his favorite game, because most controllers are designed with buttons that are impossible to use by people with such a disease. That’s when Caleb stepped win: He designed a simple little piece of 3D printed plastic that attaches to a joystick.

Kim, a senior innovator from Nike, had the help of Nike designer Mark Smith to do the illustrations, while she was undergoing chemo, because the patient needed to have something that could satisfy her short attention span.

“It’s ok to laugh and say, ‘You have cancer and it’s going to be okay,’” Kim said. She is now in complete remission.

The book is filled with puzzles, mazes, and ‘Find the Lump’ word searches.

Together they launched, in 2015, a kickstarter campaign with a goal of $15,000, which will get 1,000 books into cancer centers across USA.

The solution the innovators created consists of a device that Simeon can wear to keep his trombone in a correct position that causes no tension, in which the left hand operates the slide.

The students decided to help Simeon after they read about his story at Design for Everyone, a project aimed at finding solutions for people with physical disabilities.

The latter, with its playful side, is now used by Gabriel during the majority of his trips back home. It may also carry toys, making him able participate in everyday tasks with his parents.

The follow equipment was used:

a wooden chair
2 stainless steel handles
4 swivel casters (diameter 50 mm)

Instructions:

The structure is made of scrap metal, springs, an identical gel battery to those used for electronic cars and a 12V hydraulic piston recovered on a small car. The structure can be painted with anti-corrosion spray to prevent rust.

It works when Iago presses a button that is suited to his strength and the bed starts moving from side. When he presses another button, the bed tilts to the other side.

“As Iago can not go back, this lightweight control allows it to tilt the mattress in the desired position”, Robin explained.