IEEE Spectrum May, 2015 - 16

MAY 2015

north AMericAn

quarter of the population is 65 or
older, the highest proportion of
any country. But Whill also has an
office in Silicon Valley, which has
a generation of gadget-loving people who are growing old. The initial market will be for the disabled,
but the company, which has raised
$11 million from Japanese and U.S.
investors, hopes to ultimately
broaden sales to anyone who has
difficulty walking or standing.
The intent is to "create an image
that, rather than a chair for the
disabled, this is stylish transportation," says Sugie.
Of course, the big question for
Whill is, will it sell?
History is not on the company's side. Both Toyota and Honda
have demonst rated f ut urist ic
personal mobilit y protot y pes
but haven't yet commercialized
them. In 1999, famed inventor
Dean Kamen unveiled a robotic
wheelchair called iBot. At $25,000,
it was expensive, but it could climb
curbs, allow users to raise the seat
so that they would be at eye level
with a standing person, and even
go up and down stairs. The U.S.
Food and Drug Administration
approved it as a medical device,
and insurers covered part of the
cost. Still, its high cost was one of
the reasons it was discontinued
in 2009.
IEEE Fellow Rory A. Cooper, a
professor in the Department of
Rehabilitation Science and Technology at the University of Pittsburgh, says Whill's chair looks
like a good product, but he doesn't
think its technolog y is particularly innovative. He should know:
Cooper, who has used a wheelchair
for 30 years, is a world-renowned
mobility expert and director of
the Center of Excellence in Wheelchairs and Associated Rehabilitation Engineering, part of the U.S.
Department of Veterans Affairs.
"Omnidirectional wheels have
been around for 30 years, and fourwheel drive has been around for
at least 15 years," he says.
He adds that if insurers can at
least partially cover its cost, Whill
may appeal to many adults today
who have higher expectations
for remaining active longer and
are more accepting of technology than previous generations.
After all, "today's 65-year-olds
were early adopters of things like
personal computers, PDAs, and
mobile phones," he s ays.
-Ta M H a r BerT

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GOOGLE'S YEAR
OF FORGETTING
Following a european court ruling,
google expunged more than half
a million links

Google has gotten better at forgetting. A year ago, a European court
ruled that Google search results in
the European Union were subject
to European data-protection rules. That meant
that while private individuals might not be able
to force a newspaper to retract an irrelevant
or outdated story about them, they could ask
Google to remove links to the story. Despite a
slow start, the search giant has now caught up
with the requests. In the meantime, Americans,
Japanese, Koreans, and others around the world
are proposing the adoption of similar privacyprotection policies.
Google-which can claim 93 percent of the European search market, according to StatCounter-
began removing certain links from search results on
its EU pages in June. The removals were in response
to a 13 May 2014 ruling by the Court of Justice of the
European Union that enables residents to request
the removal of search engine results that point to
prickly parts of their past. If it did anything, the
ruling proved that personal privacy is popular:
Google got over 41,000 requests in the fi rst four
days it accepted them. Requests later leveled off
at around 1,000 per day.
The off-line analogy might be a guest asking
a party host not to bring up an old, reputationtarnishing story. It is still up to the host to decide
whether to comply, and other guests may still
whisper-or shout. But thanks to the CJEU ruling,
search engine results in the EU are now subject to
the same data-protection rules as other companyheld personal data. It's as if party attendees could
now ask the party host to keep mum, with the
threat of appealing to a national agency.
Yet the ruling left open many questions about
how to comply. Soon after removals began in
June, for example, Google restored certain links
when publishers argued that the stories in ques-

WHIll

planet. And the older population is
likely to help drive up the number
of people with disabilities, which
is at 15 percent today, according
to the World Health Organization.
CEO and cofounder Satoshi
Sugie, who left Nissan to start
Whill, tells IEEE Spectrum that
he got the idea for the startup
when he met a disabled man who
would no longer go to the grocery
store in his wheelchair because
of the way people looked at him.
Although wheelchair users are
often physically fit, the traditional
chair can create the impression
that its occupant is weak and helpless, he says.
With that in mind, Sugie and his
colleagues set out to completely
reenvision-and reengineer-the
power wheelchair. One of the key
innovations of the Model A is its
two front wheels, whose rims are
each wrapped with two dozen
small rubber tires that turn independently. Designed by a retired
Toyota engineer who is on staff at
the startup, these omnidirectional
wheels allow the chair to move in
any direction more easily and with
a tight turning radius.
The Model A also has a fourwheel-drive system and a motor
controller that let users drive
over almost any kind of surface.
A lead-acid battery gives the chair
a range of nearly 20 kilometers on
one charge. To steer it, you can use
either a joystick on the armrest or
an app on your iPhone.
It's no coincidence that Whill
was founded in Japan ( just outside of Tokyo), where more than a

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum May, 2015