Join me on Twitter
© WeCapable.com

Wheelchair of Stephen Hawking: Interesting Facts

Stephen Hawking in 1986. Photo by Associated Press.
Avatar
Lalit Kumar | May 22, 2017 (Last update: May 22, 2017)

Lalit Kumar is a Polio Survivor and the founder of WeCapable. He loves finding useful things on Internet and knows how to put them together to create a bigger solution. He is passionate about technology, languages and literature. Besides WeCapable, Lalit has also founded TechWelkin, Kavita Kosh and Gadya Kosh websites.

Professor Stephen Hawking has been using a specially configured wheelchair since 1997. Before that, his wheelchair was a common powered wheelchair. Today, wheelchair of Stephen Hawking wheelchair is probably the most sci-fi looking wheelchair. A lot of people have a lot of questions about his wheelchair. So, today, we will explain how this special chair works.

Wheelchair of Professor Hawking

  1. In 1985, Professor Hawking contracted severe pneumonia and he had to be operated for tracheotomy. As a result he lost his ability to speak. Due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) he had already lost movement in his hands. So, after losing speech, he initially communicated by raising an eyebrow when he was shown alphabets on a spelling card.
  2. In 1986, Walter Woltosz, CEO of Word Plus, presented a computer program called Equalizer to Professor Hawking. This program had a database of about 3,000 commonly used words. The professor could select the desired words with a click. These words were collected by the program to make sentences. This program ran on a desktop computer and thus the professor could use it only in one place.
  3. David, husband of Elaine Mason (professor’s nurse who he later married), was a computer engineer and he made Equalizer to run of a smaller computer attached to the wheelchair of Professor Hawking. Now, he could use the program wherever he went on his wheelchair.
    Stephen Hawking in 1986. Photo by Associated Press.
  4. In 1997, his powered wheelchair was fitted with a speech synthesizer. This computer system was sponsored by Intel® Corporation. It is a tablet computer attached to his powered wheelchair.
  5. This speech synthesizer works pretty much like Equalizer — but it can also convert the selected words into speech using a text-to-speech software. Thus, Professor Hawking can speak using the voice of someone else.
  6. Because his disability is progressive in nature, Professor Hawking is losing use of more and more muscles. Now the famous scientist uses a cheek muscle to select letters. Computer slowly goes through all the letters and when he twitches the muscle computer stops and selects the letter.
  7. The sensor that detects the cheek muscle movement is attached to his glasses.
  8. The current tablet computer is Lenovo Yoga 260 with Intel i7 processor with 512GB SSD drive. Operating system is Windows 10.
    Photograph of Stephen Hawking
  9. Synthesizer software is called Assistive Context-Aware Toolkit (ACAT). This open source software has also been developed by Intel.
  10. Tablet computer attached to wheelchair gets power from the batteries of wheelchair.
  11. Earlier Professor Hawking could speak about 15 words per minute. But now, with his deteriorating condition, he can manage only one or two words per minute.
  12. Scientists and engineers at Intel keeps of refining computer algorithm to predict what he wants to say.
  13. When he has to give a lecture, he beforehand writes the whole lecture in computer word-by-word from the database.  He then saves the lecture on his computer. While delivering the lecture, he sends one paragraph at a time to the speech synthesizer. The software converts this paragraph into speech.

These were some of the important facts about the wheelchair of Stephen Hawking. Let us know if you have more specific information on this topic. Thank you!

Citation
Use the citation below to add this article to your bibliography
Styles:

"Wheelchair of Stephen Hawking: Interesting Facts." Wecapable.com. Web. March 29, 2024. <https://wecapable.com/wheelchair-of-stephen-hawking-facts/>

Wecapable.com, "Wheelchair of Stephen Hawking: Interesting Facts." Accessed March 29, 2024. https://wecapable.com/wheelchair-of-stephen-hawking-facts/

"Wheelchair of Stephen Hawking: Interesting Facts." (n.d.). Wecapable.com. Retrieved March 29, 2024 from https://wecapable.com/wheelchair-of-stephen-hawking-facts/

© WeCapable.com   

4 responses to “Wheelchair of Stephen Hawking: Interesting Facts”

  1. Avatar Bhaskar Choudhury says:

    I have a friend Dr Krishna Kumar Sahu, popularly known as Rajat Krishna, living in a little known town of Chhattisgarh state (India) has been suffering from muscular dystrophy and is confined to a powered wheelchair for more than 15 years. His life is as exemplary as is that of Dr Hawking. He had a very pathetic life about 22-25 years ago. But the urge of living and the regaining the strength of mind helped him a resurrection. He started his studies after a gap of six years and gradually picked up with confidence which he had lost for many years. Today he is a professor in a Govt. college teaching language to his students. Everyday he on his wheelchair goes to his college which is five – kilometer away from his home; using his fingertips on the joystick. Today he is known as the most hardworking, innovative and popular professor in the college.

  2. Avatar Bhaskar Choudhury says:

    This is an outstanding post. In fact it added a lot to my perception of Sir Stephen Hawking and the way our engineers especially from intel have been helping the incredible professor.

  3. Avatar Stephen Everette Goll says:

    What is the possibility of purchasing the Stephen Hawking mini wheelchair?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *