Stephen Hawking’s wheelchair maker, DragonMobility, seeks funding to keep going

DragonMobility, the not-for-profit bespoke wheelchair maker whose customers have included Professor Stephen Hawking, is in trouble.

The Pampisford-based mobility equipment manufacturer, founded in 2005, is currently not able to build either of its two models, the Dragon for adults, and the SnapDragon for younger people or those of smaller build, including managing director Ruth Everard.

“The Dragon is the larger one and the SnapDragon is the smaller one,” explains Ruth. “I use that because I’m of small stature, so I can have a slightly more compact machine which is more convenient.

“There’s two chairs, but they’re all bespoke. The base size is different but basically it’s the same machine at different scales.”

Ruth took on the role in 2016, allowing father and founder Dan to concentrate on the engineering side, although his health has declined since major surgery that year.

“I had to face not only saying goodbye to my dad but also all that knowledge he hadn’t recorded,” says Ruth of the time, adding that “he’s spent the last few years recording that and getting that down to the point that he can retire, so it’s nice to be able to pick up the phone but actually we’re not dependent on him”.

Then came the pandemic.

“We can’t do any builds at the moment, in-house manufacturing stopped during the pandemic. Grants were only available for R&D so we used those to develop the model to have a longer design life, to be self-sustainable and to make maintenance easier. So now you can do maintenance at home which is huge, because otherwise you have to send an engineer round.

“Our assumption had been that it’s better if you can get a bike mechanic rather than get an engineer in, but during the pandemic we found out where those limits are and now we’ve made the range more self-serviceable.

“So for instance the gearbox is now even easier to look after, you don’t need specialist tools, and we’re looking at how the electronics and the wiring works. It’s about reducing the amount of specialist tools, resources and skills involved.”

These changes represent progress, but production is still on hold. So how can the not-for-profit be restored to full functionality?

“We need to bring the manufacturing back in-house,” replies Ruth. “There are people desperately waiting to have one of these machines and at the moment we can’t do it.

“There’s a little girl in Australia who asked her dad to come to visit us in Papworth because she needed a new Dragon, plus a young lady in Yorkshire, one in Fowlmere… it’s people saying I can’t enjoy my life without this level of mobility and this level of integration.

“For a young girl it’s giving them integration into mainstream society, where someone who is very seriously disabled can go into a non-adaptive environment and do the same things as their peers. We are a social enterprise, we’re inviting investors and donors to put small amounts in, rather than one person to put the whole lot in. It’s a small investment, or a significant charitable donation. It’s only an opportunity to high net worth individuals, it can’t be offered to the world at large.”

The investment would provide a new lease of life for the company whose product was given the ultimate wheelchair endorsement by Prof Hawking.

“Yes, he had a Dragon,” Ruth says. “He used his Dragon a lot because it travels very easily, it fits into the hold of an aircraft very easily.

“There’s a cracking photo of Stephen on his Dragon giving one of his NASA memorial lectures, and receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom [America’s highest civilian honour] from Barack Obama in 2009, and he met the Pope in his Dragon (2916).

“The Dragon was one of his wheelchairs, he had a fleet of machines for different purposes, lucky chap.”

At that point he was already using a screen attached to his wheelchair, did DragonMobility work on that?

“We worked with Intel for the screen holder, and with Stephen’s own engineer to make the screen work and run the whole thing off the Dragon.

“He found it comforting to have the screen in front of him when he was out in the world. He was much more comfortable: without the screen he found it much more alarming because the screen wasn’t containing him, he was exposed to the world. That [sense of being exposed] happens with disabled people who take a leap and come out in the world, so he had a Dragon with a screen on it.”

It’s troubling to hear this unique Cambridge company is struggling – but it’s not too tall an order to fix it.

“We want to inspire a few people to say ‘Here, use my £10k well’ and we’ve had a few already and it’s very encouraging but we want some more,” concludes Ruth. “We need a group of people to come together: it’s always been our story that when a group of people in Cambridge come together, it works.”