Soul Mobility rolls toward Power-Flex launch

Founded in 2020, Soul Mobility has had an amazing year, and its product hasn’t even hit the market yet.

Fresh off the company’s win in the Wisconsin Governor’s Business Plan Contest in the Life Science category, Soul Mobility also secured the Impact Award at the Rehabilitation Engineering Society of North America conference.

The product behind all of the hype, Power-Flex, is a device that converts manual wheelchairs into joystick-operated power chairs easily.

For Todd Hargroder, founder of Accessible Design Inc. (ADI), a company he exited in 2016, Power-Flex is the result of years of work and personal passion. In 1986, when he was 19 years-old, he sustained a spinal cord injury due to a motocross accident. Within a year of the life-changing accident, he launched the ADI with the aim to improve wheelchair mobility options. Today, he is considered one of the leading innovators of wheelchair mobility in the world.

“Power-Flex allows an individual to take their manual wheelchair frame, remove the wheels and plug it into the power base without any adapters or tools. It quickly converts that manual chair to a power chair. The big thing about that is we’re in the same space that we would be,” company cofounder Hargroder explained.

“When I sit in my chair in a manual configuration, versus in my power base configuration, it feels the exact same height, the same depth, and that’s really important for us to be able to live and manage within our home and work and other environments because when you go from a manual chair in your home and the environment is set up for that and then you go into a big power chair, Everything has to change, so this allows everybody to be on that same level, but you know more importantly, it just gives you the freedom to  have the choice to either go manual or power,” he continued.

“I think the big differentiator for the general public when we say any wheelchair is the product is really targeted towards an active manual wheelchair user versus an aging or person that is having trouble walking around. we refer to the type of chair that it is compatible with as an ultra-light, rigid chair frame,” cofounder Troy Tesmer added.

Soul-Mobility plans to release Power-Flex in quarter two of 2024. After six prototypes, the product is currently in third-party testing, a critical step in the FDA approval process for the Class II medical device.

Hargroder and Tesmer met at an industry trade show years ago and began collaborating on mobility projects Hargroder designed. In 2020, Hargroder launched Soul Mobility and Tesmer joined the company as president in 2022.

The company hopes to duplicate its successful summer this week as competitors in the Healthcare Innovation Tech Pitch Competition. The company is one of eight teams competing for seed funding, scaling resources and the opportunity to meet with investors in the healthcare industry.

Soul Mobility is focused on the future and looks forward to approval to begin Power-Flex production. The company has secured a Wisconsin-based manufacturer for the device.

“I pushed a manual chair for many years… as we’re getting closer to production, we’re able to show it to more and more people. Some of my friends and colleagues have tried it and it’s really exciting to see the light bulb go off them about how important this dual-purpose flex is for people. We went to the VA in San Antonio and those therapists got it right away,” Hargroder said.

To learn more about Soul Mobility, connect with the emerging company here.