How a special needs child’s happiness can disrupt the entire wheelchair industry

Medical devices are a notoriously expensive to design and especially launch but when Debby Elnatan and the team at Firefly designed the Upsee, it upended the wheelchair industry. Here’s how she did it:

Innovation requires rule breaking and in the case of the design of the Upsee, the indications are clear: Dr’s suggested that Debby’s child not walk or crawl. Physical Therapists suggested she not even move her child. In this case the mother of invention became a literal reality during the creation of the device throughout the years that Debbie perfected the device. Profiled on US national and international television the design of the device, branding, research and manufacturing clearly illustrates that necessity is in fact the mother not of invention but of innovation. Look out wheelchair industry.