Usability & Transfers

Elevating your seat enables you to reach higher places in everyday living environments, such as kitchen shelving at able-bodied standing level. This powered function can support your daily living needs, such as during meal preparation or when doing your grocery shopping, and may allow you to reduce your reliance on attendant support. In social contexts, seat elevation enables you to speak face-to-face with people who are standing, which delivers both interpersonal and physical benefits. At concerts, events or sports matches the lift function improves your view and elevating your seat while moving is also helpful when navigating through busy pedestrian areas or crowds.

The ability to tilt your seat may be important when negotiating steep slopes or kerbs, both for providing footrest clearance and maintaining your safe and comfortable centre of gravity within the chair. A tilted seat position can also enable everyday tasks such as eating or driving a vehicle. The ability to recline your seat may assist with toileting or adjusting your position. Forward tilt can improve your ability to reach items on benches and may assist with forward transfers.

The ability to remove, swing back or drop down your joystick controller enables a number of everyday activities, such as sitting comfortably at a desk or table, accessing driving controls or avoiding damage to your powerchair during travel or transportation.

Apart from lateral transfers, the ability to lift or lower your armrest can be practical in all sorts of situations. For example, one of our Extreme X8 users does so to practice her archery skills, whereas others may raise or lower their armrest to get closer to a table or desk, or to do their washing. Discover more about our flip up and flexi arm rests.

The ability to remove or fold down your seat back makes transportation of your powered wheelchair possible when space is limited, such as in the rear of an SUV or in an airplane hold when travelling.

The ability to tilt your seat forward is known as anterior tilt. This powered capability may make forward transfers easier, with or without assistance.

Our front, rear and mid-wheel drive Frontier range of bases can all be fitted with transfer tilt that provides up to 13° forward slope in the chair’s seat.

Our Magic 360 bases have been designed so that a standard tilt or tilt and elevate function can be fitted to enable 5° of anterior tilt at the lowest position.

Please note that our Extreme X8, XT2 and XT4 bases cannot be fitted with anterior tilt.

When transferring forwards from your powerchair, the main challenge is to minimise tripping risks associated with the footplate attached to the chair. Your choice of an ideal leg rest depends on a range of factors associated mainly with your physical condition.

Our basic leg rest option is a central post to which a variety of footplate options can be attached, including flip-up footplates and footplate shapes and sizes of various kinds. For people with the ability or assistance to manually flip up their footrest, this option is most cost-effective.

Our Transfer Tilt articulating footplate is recommended for people who can manage an independent forward transfer, but cannot flip up their footplate, or who need to put their weight onto the footplate when transferring. This hinged-footplate mount articulates once the footplate reaches the floor, enabling the full extent of anterior tilt while minimizing tripping risks and assisting the natural motion of the body to transfer forward.

An alternative way to enable independent or personally assisted forward transfers is to use our Swing Away leg rests, which swing sideways to clear the space in front of the chair.

Key to enabling a lateral or sideways transfer is to move the armrest up and out of the way. Magic Mobility provide two options to enable this to happen; the simpler is a flip-up armrest that pivots at its connection point to the backrest frame. The flexi armrest enables the same flip-up movements, as well as lateral adjustments that allow for all sorts of other armrest placements.

Another key function to enable lateral transfers is seat elevation. This may be required to align the level of your powerchair seat with whichever surface you are transferring to or from. Typically, this is required for transfers into or out of your bed but may also be key to allowing you to transfer into a motor vehicle.

If you usually use sling hoists to get into and out of your chair, you may benefit from tilting back your seat to shift your centre of gravity. This allows the sling to be fitted and harnessed around you more quickly and easily. Some users also use the recline feature to assist with this.