Toyota Mobility Foundation launches $4m design challenge

Launched by the Toyota Mobility Foundation in partnership with Nesta’s Challenge Prize Centre, the competition is looking for teams around the world to create user-centred technologies that will ‘radically improve’ mobility for people with lower-limb paralysis.

The organisers say the Mobility Unlimited Challenge will reward the development of personal mobility devices that incorporate intelligent systems and that future mobility solutions could be derived from exoskeletons, artificial intelligence and machine learning, cloud computing and batteries.

The most common causes of lower-limb paralysis are strokes, spinal cord injury and multiple sclerosis. While there are no statistics on paralysis worldwide, the World Health Organisation estimates there are 250,000-500,000 new cases of spinal cord injury globally every year.

Innovation in “smarter” mobility technology has the potential to create personal devices that are better integrated with the user’s body and the environment, but the application of this technology is slow due to disincentives. These include small and fragmented markets, regulatory burdens, and reimbursement complexities from healthcare systems and insurers.