ABBY by GOGOTECH Founder John DeBenedette on Accessible Medical Assistance

ABBY is a new personal electric vehicle for adults with reduced mobility. ABBY is loaded with advanced features, including machine vision, IoT infused semi-autonomy, smart push rim technology for power-assisted self-propulsion, and much more. Plus ABBY will be easy to purchase directly online with “buy now, pay later” financing available for around $3,000 (that’s less than half of anything comparable). 

Using wheelchairs on and off since an accident in 1985, I know firsthand how difficult manual wheelchairs are to use independently. Unfortunately, powered wheelchairs are heavy, expensive, based on decades-old technology, and distributed through complex healthcare bureaucracy. The more inexpensive mobility scooters are unstable, and handlebars make them hard to maneuver in an indoor home use setting. If you have to be wealthy or well-insured to get a high quality powered mobility device, it means the system is broken. We want to disrupt this status quo and make high-function power chairs safe, advanced, and affordable for everyone who needs them, regardless of income or insurance.

I met my co-founder Dr. Clarence Tan, formerly a Singularity University Asia Pacific ambassador, while I was living in Thailand and he introduced me to our lead engineer, Wei Wen Jing, in Shenzhen, China. Wei has designed and built battery electric vehicles for more than a decade. We are a lean but uniquely qualified team and we all share a passion to help democratize powered mobility.

Our approach to the $7 billion wheelchair industry is an expansion play, geared to disrupt the notion promulgated by the incumbents that powered mobility devices are a privilege reserved for only the wealthy and the well-insured. We plan to accomplish this through a combination of product, business model, and market timing innovations.

We look at competition on several indices. When designing ABBY, we started with the most versatile form-factor, a traditional rear-wheel drive with push handles and 24-inch main wheels that are capable of self-propulsion. Then we added smart-push rim technology for power assist, and then a smart controller with machine vision and IoT. 

We started the research and development on ABBY in 2018. Prior to launching our community round on Wefunder, we completed the hardware molds and tooling, frame jigs, and our printed circuit board masters (for motor drive and joystick controller), so the most capital intensive aspects are behind us.

We are launching direct to consumer. Onboarding our pre-order customers successfully ourselves is a critical milestone for us. Over time (and we’ve already been approached by some leading channels), we absolutely will look to expand our reach — at least as far as order placement is concerned.

We’ve met our first goal already, which means we can produce our first 100 units. We’ll use these 100 units to complete some of the destructive test cases in ISO7176 conformance, a test that determines wheelchair stability, and to fill and onboard selected pre-orders as pilot users, keeping the balance for launch inventory. We need to continue raising to make a few key hires, establish our US warehouse, and continue work on the software before we’ll be ready to begin taking orders to ship from inventory in the first half of 2023.

In the first two years we’re going to stick to our knitting and make sure ABBY is meeting our customers’ needs and we have a working formula before expanding geographically to the top 15 power chair markets and then the rest of the world. We have a rich product road map that increases the versatility both on the hardware and software and robotics side as well as regulatory clearances (so we don’t have to turn away insurance coverage). We’ll balance where we invest in geographic expansion and product road map as we go. We want to live in a world where everyone who needs powered mobility has access to safe, advanced, affordable assistive technology, regardless of income or insurance. We’re focused on launching and growing the business, but it’s no secret that this industry is concentrated and mergers and acquisitions are common. We’ll see what happens.