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Comment by teddyh | Hacker News Reader

This seems too unpowered to be the best option in places with reliable electric power, and for places without reliable electric power, this looks too complex to be reliably repaired without a service infrastructure. And if you have that, you probably have reliable electric power. In short, it looks like a solution looking for a problem.

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as the website itself points out one of the explicit purposes is to keep people moving and exercising. Keeping people mobile (like the MS affected woman in the clip) is a great idea.

One of the worst things for people who are already impaired is to be overly sedentary because it accelerates function loss. It doesn't surprise me at all that this is coming out of the Netherlands by the way, a country that has a strong culture of keeping people healthy and active.

yes, the Netherlands is a beacon of human-scale and human-oriented urban development (https://www.youtube.com/c/NotJustBikes documents this really well) and this invention fits in nicely with that perspective.

This is probably an order of magnitude less expensive to install than anything that requires power. Also a lot of people might not have as reliable power as they think (see Austin last winter).

If you can use something less complex with fewer requirements that’s usually better. Do the simplest thing that solves the problem.

If it's cheaper than the other alternatives then it has a place.

It probably isn't though. My mother in law's stairlift was installed in a couple of hours along the normal stairs. There was no building work to create a shaft needed. It was cheap.

This is key - they didn't have to do construction and make a shaft with the chairlift. That'll put the prices up.

Reengineer this mechanism to run along inclined rails.

If cantilevering from rails on one side is impractical, make it detach from the opposite rail at the top/bottom and swing out of the way.

The requirements for space (a column of free area 80cm by 80cm) are so small that I don't even think they make elevators that small.

You don't have 80cm between normal floor joists so installation in a regular house could be complex and expensive. If you are designing a multistory new build specifically for the elderly leaving a space for a solution like this to be installed/uninstalled in the future could be added to building standards.

sure, I'm just saying that a elevator normally takes up much more space and is therefore more expensive to start with.

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